Raufer Updates

Jeremy & Roger on Mount Tai

As part of my GEF/World Bank project in China, I made a trip to Taian in Shandong Province and Taiyuan in Shanxi Province in May, giving presentations about emissions trading to several hundred local officials, company representatives, academics, and other interested parties. Luckily, my friend and colleague Jeremy Schreifels from U.S. EPA’s Clean Air Markets Division was along on this trip. I first met Jeremy in the 1990s in Ukraine, when we were working together on a U.S. AID project there – and have stayed in touch since. He is currently wrapping up a Ph.D. from Tsinghua University on NOx control in China, and since his courses are in Chinese, I was very happy to let him deal with all of the taxis, waiters, and others who normally have to suffer from my indecipherable Mandarin, finger pointing, & awkward pantomimes.

Taiyuan has changed pretty dramatically since I was last there ten years ago, and lots of construction is still going on. A real highlight of the Taian visit was a side trip to Tai Shan, the most important of China’s five great mountains — and a natural landmark long revered and visited by emperors throughout China’s history. Its importance is evident in the fact that an illustration of Tai Shan is included on the country’s five yuan currency note. That note shows the mountain rising above a ‘sea of clouds,’ which was exactly the view we had. Climbing has been a theme of many recent ‘Raufer Update’ postings, but timing constraints (ahem!) forced us to skip the 10+ kilometer hike with its thousands of steps, and take the cable car instead. That still left plenty of climbing at the summit, however, to take in the temple complex, the Immortal Bridge, the carved rock inscriptions, and many other sights. Truly a magnificent experience!

I stayed in Beijing before, after and in-between the Taian/Taiyuan trips, and therefore had a chance to have a series of meetings with academic, private-sector, NGO and Chinese governmental officials during this two-week visit. During that time I was reading a book entitled Midnight in Peking, a real-life murder mystery about the 1937 slaying of the daughter of a British diplomat/scholar in the city. Despite the rather gruesome topic, it’s a very entertaining read because the author skillfully weaves in details about the anarchy of conditions in the city at that time, the coming Japanese invasion, the Legation Quarter home of the foreign contingent in the city, and colorful characters interacting in both high and very, very lowbrow settings – all while trying to solve the murder case.

By happenstance, I was staying in the Chong Wen Men district on this trip instead of in my usual haunts in the northern part of the city – and that put me almost exactly in the middle of the author’s audio walking tour for the book. And so of course I did the whole tour, including a visit to Armour Factory Alley (now Kuijiachang Hutong), the place where she and her father lived, a few houses down from where Edgar Snow was writing Red Star Over China; Chuanpan Hutong, which the author describes as “the baddest and most depraved street in old Peking,” the heart of the ‘Badlands’ area where one could find low-life bars, gambling dens, nightclubs, brothels, and much else…. and where she was very likely murdered; and the Legation Quarter, which still has European-styled buildings and parks, and housed the French, American and British diplomatic corps. The British legation was the site where foreigners gathered for a last stand in 1900 during the Boxer Rebellion — and it now houses China’s Ministry of Public Security.

Fox Tower

My hotel was only a few hundred meters from Fox Tower (now called Dongbianmen), which played a key role in the book since that was the site where her body was found. I went back the next day to climb the tower, and visit the Ming Dynasty City Wall Relics Park along the southern section of the old city wall. The tower was home to some powerful (and dangerous) animalistic spirits in the city’s legends, and many residents were not surprised about the role it played in the grisly tale. Although only remnants of the wall remain, one can still look down from the tower and begin to grasp the sheer scale and impact it must have had on the city’s life.

In the paper I wrote for Energy Intelligence last summer, I cited just one economist – Robert H. Nelson, who published “The Economics Profession and the Making of Public Policy” in the J. of Economic Literature more than a quarter-century ago…. & I’ve been following his work ever since. About a decade ago, I read his book Economics as Religion, a great read which posits that while economists think of themselves as scientists, they might more accurately be viewed as priests proselytizing a secular religion – the well-known ‘gospel of efficiency.’ By assuming away important factors – e.g., the ‘pecuniary externalities’ of market transformations, or the ‘non-use’ values of environmental amenities – they’ve played a key role in legitimizing that “most vital religion of the modern age”: economic progress.

On this trip I was reading Nelson’s latest book, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America. The book is every bit as iconoclastic as the last one, with the target this time being environmentalists – who would no doubt be surprised to find themselves being likened to Creationists. By ignoring Darwin on several fronts (i.e., trying to re-create pristine landscapes that didn’t exist, lamenting the “great Darwinian triumph of our own species,”etc.), and utilizing Biblical imagery and threats, Nelson suggests that environmentalism has “reasserted the powerful U.S. Puritan heritage,” but in a secular form “free of the historical baggage of institutional Christianity.”

His work is both erudite and provocative, and he’s tackling the core intersection of economics and environmentalism – and so I’ll definitely continue to track his on-going efforts!

I’m sure you realize that I usually deal with pollution control and the so-called ‘mitigation’ side of climate change issues…. so I was a bit surprised (and also pleased) when the UN asked me to conduct an evaluation of a project dealing primarily with ‘adaptation’ concerns. Former U.S. Vice President Al Gore, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for his work on global warming, addressed this dichotomy in his recent book The Future: Six Drivers of Global Change:

For my own part, I used to argue many years ago that resources and effort put into adaptation would divert attention from the all-out push that is necessary to mitigate global warming and quickly build the political will to sharply reduce emissions of global warming pollution. I was wrong – not wrong that deniers would propose adaptation as an alternative to mitigation, but wrong in not immediately grasping the moral imperative of pursuing both policies simultaneously, in spite of the difficulty that poses.

He went on to note that consequences are already occurring and are particularly devastating to low income developing countries. The UN project I evaluated addressed how three countries – Grenada, Guatemala and Bolivia – might integrate such adaptation concerns into their national planning programs. (And sorry, but since it’s an internal evaluation report, I wasn’t able to post it here.)

One interesting focus of the report, however, is the distinction between sustainability and a newer environmental buzzword: resilience. In a New York Times opinion piece (and also in Wired magazine), the futurist Andrew Zolli noted that many of the buildings in southern Manhattan rebuilt after 9/11 received LEED certification, & were viewed as being low-emission and eco-efficient — and hence sustainable. But then Hurricane Sandy arrived and flooded their basements (where all of the energy equipment was located) — and the lights went out. These buildings were certainly not resilient!

In a previous posting, I noted that Mr. Zolli and I were speakers at a CLSA session at the ‘Rainbow Room’ in Rockefeller Center in New York City (in early 2007). He now has a new book out about this topic — Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back (along with co-author Ann Marie Healy) — and of course I cited it in the UN evaluation. I enjoyed the book, and his early chapters about ecosystem and financial system resiliency are particularly interesting.

Prof. Mohan Munasinghe, head of the Munasinghe Institute for Development (MIND) in Sri Lanka, played an especially important role in this three-country project. Back in 1994, I directed a four-month, US AID-funded training course on ‘Energy Planning & Policy’ at U. Penn for 28 energy executives from fifteen developing countries. I invited numerous experts from the UN, World Bank, academia & the private sector — including Prof. Munasinghe — to give lectures, and when the participants in that program completed their evaluations, he scored as the very best of all! In this UN project, he laid out a methodological approach called the Action Impact Matrix which considers not only impacts on the environment, but also the effect of the environment on the specific strategies being pursued (i.e., the very key to resilience). Perhaps not surprisingly, the participants in this project had very much the same view about his contributions.

This year’s GE class had 27 engineers from 19 different countries – all regular engineers this time, and not an MBA or economics degree amongst the bunch! The day before the lectures started, the Environment Committee of the European Parliament held an important vote to rescue the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), now awash in carbon allowances. It’s not finalized yet, but hopefully I’ll still be able to talk about the EU ETS next year….. instead of giving a post-mortem report, like I have to do for the US SO2 market.

Most of the time, the engineers in the class will smile (or at least give a low groan) if I tell a nerdy technical joke, but this year I didn’t even bother to tell them about a bumper sticker I recently came across:

Calculus: The Agony and dx/dt

I thought this was absolutely hilarious, and quickly sent it off to my daughters (two of whom are engineers)….. but their response (huh????) made me realize that these young engineers wouldn’t have appreciated it either. For those of you under 60 still scratching your heads, the bumper sticker is a pun on a best-selling 1961 Irving Stone novel, The Agony and the Ecstasy, later made into a film (of the same name) starring Charlton Heston. The book is a biographical novel of Michelangelo, but it wasn’t available on Kindle — so I bought an old, used college library copy (which somehow seemed more appropriate), and also checked out the movie on Netflix. I enjoyed them both very much!

In recent years I’ve made excursions back to the Accademia di Belle Arti to see David, and also to the Sistine Chapel and the Pietà in Rome…. [you realize, I’m sure, that not everything makes it into ‘Raufer Updates’!] So the book & the movie were just part of an ongoing, lifelong, never-ending Michelangelo appreciation tour — & this Florence visit allowed me to add a few more stops on that tour.

Hotel & Santa Maria Novella

In the first section of the novel, 13-year-old Michelangelo was serving as an apprentice to Domenico Ghirlandaio, and assisting him in painting frescoes in the Basilica of Santa Maria Novella. A visit to see these frescoes wasn’t too hard to arrange, since I was staying in the Grand Hotel Minerva, immediately adjacent to the church. Other visits included the Sagrestia Nuova in the Medici Chapel of the San Lorenzo Basiilica (described in section nine), as well as his final resting place in the Basilica of Santa Croce (just a few paces from the tombs of Galileo and Machiavelli, other Renaissance notables).

Michelangelo’s Tomb

Also in that ninth section of the novel, a heavy-hearted Michelangelo leaves the city on horseback, and

“…turned to look back at the Duomo, Baptistery and Campanile, at the tawny tower of the Palazzo Vecchio glistening in the September sunlight, at the exquisite city of stone nestled under its red tile roof. It was hard to take leave of one’s city; hard to feel that, close to sixty, he could not count on returning.”

But the very next sentence reads: “Resolutely he turned the horses south toward Rome,” and the author notes that this genius/artist still had a third of his life remaining ahead of him, with some of his finest sculpture, painting and architectural works still to come. No wonder I liked the book so much!

San Juan Capistrano

My daughter and her family – and thus three of my five grandchildren – moved out to Southern California early last year, and we figured that February would be a great time to go see them. It turned out to be a good decision, since we avoided snowstorms in New Jersey … and had nice sunny weather in LA! I had a bit of r&r, and we beat the swallows to San Juan Capistrano this year … & took in some other sites around the region as well.
I hadn’t been out to LA for quite a while (since a 2007 trip for CLSA), and decided to prepare for the trip by reading Smogtown: A Lung-Burning History of Pollution in Los Angeles, an interesting book written by a couple of local journalists that came out the following year. They teased that “Orange County got its name from the color of its atmosphere, not its indigenous fruit,” and included some fascinating historical pictures… as well as a brief description of the complicated pollution trading scam (later described in greater detail by one of the authors) of a former CalTech professor turned ‘smog-credit swindler’ turned shady Philippine gold/West African ‘money repatriation’ entrepreneur.

‘Smogtown’ and ‘Sunsmoke’

Despite such tales, the authors promised in the book’s Preface that it wouldn’t be “a campy, low-brow take on the subject,” which made me think about the last book I had read about LA’s smog – a definitely campy, 1985 pulp fiction novel called Sunsmoke. You might recall that I spent many of the early years of my career doing atmospheric dispersion modeling – and this is definitely the only novel I have ever read written by a fellow dispersion modeler. They say that you can’t judge a book by its cover – but this one comes pretty close, with a nasty smog creature arising from the monitor screen of the early 80’s-era computer. The novel is replete with such moving passages as the following:

“He had been right about the clean air episode. The transport algorithm parameters had been modified. This particular solution scheme, SHASTA, Sharp and Smooth Transport Algorithm, depended on a balance between numerical diffusion (for stability) and antidiffusion (to undo the effects of the numerical diffusion). But the antidiffusion step had been amplified and the chemical composition of smog had been separated as effectively as if in a gas chromatograph.”

Yup, pretty racy novelistic writing… so what’s not to like, huh??

Sun Yat Sen on Purple Mountain

The Shenzhen energy management company I was visiting on this trip arranged for me to check out a subsidiary (as well as some of their health care & educational facility clients) in Nanjing — & I was very interested in doing so for reasons that went well beyond energy management. I’d never been to Nanjing before, but of course was well aware of its importance in Chinese history over the past century, and far into the past. Luckily, my hosts were exceedingly hospitable, and arranged a visit to the former KMT headquarters in the city; to Xuanwu Lake, and a stroll along the path linking its islands; to Soong May-ling’s (i.e., Madame Chiang Kai-shek’s) villa on Purple Mountain; and to Sun Yat Sen’s Mausoleum on the mountain – a place I’ve always wanted to visit! (And keeping with the climbing theme of recent postings, we hiked up the 392 steps on Purple Mountain necessary to reach it.) They also arranged a visit to the Memorial site of the 1937 Massacre, a place already vivid in my mind from Iris Chang’s intense book The Rape of Nanking and Lu Chuan’s powerful film The City of Life and Death. So you can see that this was a tremendously educational visit….. and I am really very, very grateful. I’m sure that you’ll be reading more about the Shenzhen company in future postings.

On this visit I was also reading Qiu Xiaolong’s latest Inspector Chen detective novel, entitled Don’t Cry, Tai Lake. You might remember my August 2007 posting noting previous Qiu novels about Inspector Chen Cao, the gourmet/poet/police inspector from Shanghai’s Police Bureau, and this one was particularly relevant since it had pollution as a major theme in the story. The novel has some strong parallels with the real-life case of Wu Lihong, an environmental activist punished for his efforts to bring about pollution control at the chemical plants lining its shores. I’ve enjoyed all of Qiu’s novels in the Inspector Chen series, and found this to be one of his better ones.

A visit with an energy management company in Shenzhen in October gave me an opportunity to stop over in Hong Kong as well – and it was really great to catch up with folks there once again. Christine Loh, Hong Kong’s new Undersecretary for the Environment, arranged a ten-person gathering for lunch, and this was followed by a meeting (arranged by Hannah Routh at PwC) that quickly became known as “the geeks’ session,” allowing for a more technical discussion about HK’s environmental situation & options.

I stayed in Kowloon on the latter part of this visit, & that also presented an opportunity…. to visit Chungking Mansions! This is a place with a somewhat shady reputation in Hong Kong – not quite as bad as the Walled City I mentioned in my August 2007 posting, but certainly not high on a list of the city’s touted tourist sites either. The anthropologist Gordon Mathews has written a fascinating new book entitled Ghetto at the Center of the World: Chungking Mansions, Hong Kong, which describes the Mansions as sort of a ‘Grand Central Station’ for low-economy globalization – the place where traders from Africa, S.E. Asia & other developing regions of the world come to buy large quantities of mobile phones, electronics, watches, and other goods manufactured cheaply (& often surreptitiously) in Mainland China. I’ve passed by the Mansions on Nathan Road many times, of course, but took the opportunity this time to actually wander around in it, informed by Mathews’ book. I also put Wong Kar-Wai’s well-known movie Chungking Express on my movie queue again, since a significant portion of the film takes place there. [Note: I’d forgotten how well that movie – almost two decades old now – captures the frenetic energy of not only Chungking Mansions, but of the city itself….. and with its homage to French New Wave cinema & other influences, it’s really a great way to spend a couple of hours!]

Kowloon arrival on Star Ferry

Staying in Kowloon also gave me an excuse – as if one was needed!! — to ride the Star Ferry once again. This trip’s photo shows a nighttime arrival in Kowloon, the exact opposite of the daytime landing in Wanchai in my July 2010 posting.

Since I live about half way between New York City & Washington DC, I frequently get the opportunity to visit these cities – but a couple of visits in September were particularly memorable.

Chinese delegation in DC

An 18 member delegation from my GEF/World Bank SO2 trading project came to visit Washington in mid-September as part of a two-week U.S. tour (which also included a couple of West Coast stops as well). I thus had a chance to bring them up to speed about the CSAPR SO2 trading regulations, which had also been the topic of my earlier March lecture in Beijing. The court ruling in mid-August surprised many of us, since we thought that EPA might lose on the timing issue – but not on the technical merits themselves (which had been crafted to address a previous court loss). The two Republican-appointed judges on the Appeals Court thought otherwise, however, and the blistering (as these things go) dissent by the Democratic-appointed judge on the panel provided our Chinese visitors with a hint about problems in regulatory market development when the government itself is polarized.

It was great to be able to catch up with my DC friend & colleague John Palmisano once again as well. He had a six hour lecture/discussion session with the Chinese delegation, and thus this group had access to one of the most knowledgeable people on the planet concerning emissions trading! (You might remember John from an October 2010 posting which mentioned our 30+ years of working together, including the HK Stock Exchange project & many others).

9/11 Memorial in NYC

And on a trip to New York City to get my China visa renewed, I also arranged to visit the 9/11 Memorial. I was in Manhattan on the morning of 9/11, at the U.N. — and I was scheduled to fly that afternoon from NYC to DC. My family knew about my travel, but not the specific flight arrangements – and so, of course, when they heard about plane crashes in both cities, they were very, very concerned. It took a few hours to get through to them on my cell phone to assure them that, in my case, everything was fine. That day was certainly a memorable one for everyone in the city – and one of the things that made it so was the spirit of cooperation and even camaraderie that bound everyone there (a most unexpected development for city folks with a reputation for being jaded & non-caring). I was eventually able to leave Manhattan late that afternoon on a U.S. Army Corp. of Engineers’ tugboat, watching as medical personnel were streaming in on those same docks to deal with a still-expected triage situation. I found the new 9/11 Memorial to be very nicely done – a suitable setting for reflecting on how precious but unpredictable life can be, with a diverse crowd and visitors from everywhere around the world paying respect to those who gave everything that day.

Photo credit: David Levene, UK’s The Guardian

This is the 100th posting on ‘Raufer Updates,’ and it certainly has been an interesting experience over the past seven years. I started it after I left the U.N., because I didn’t want my website to become completely stale – and I viewed it as essentially part of an extended c.v. You’ll note that in the first posting, I mentioned that I didn’t really consider it a blog, but rather a place to list ‘new and interesting projects’ that I’ve been working on.

The rest of the world seems to think it’s a blog, however – albeit one of the slowest moving and lethargic ones on the internet! I tend to post in clusters, rather than individually; often several weeks after an event, rather than in real-time; and I don’t allow comments or feedback. My three daughters – each with their own active blog and continuous stream of Facebook commentaries, instant messaging, phone texting, etc., etc. – consider it a somewhat Luddite venture, indicative perhaps of the efforts of someone from my generation. And despite such minimalist activities, I’m constantly besieged by internet companies who assure me that I can increase my rankings, or increase my ad revenue, if only I sign up for their two-for-one linkage swaps, special SEO deals, or similar packages designed especially for me.

I do enjoy writing these postings, however, and you’ve probably noticed an evolution over time, away from a strict listing of project work towards something that looks more and more ‘blog-like.’ I’m definitely not there yet (& still can’t afford that amount of time!), but I do very much look forward to the next 100 postings — whatever the subject matter & wherever they might take me. And a major, major thanks to Ms. Krissie Gatti, my web master/posting guru extraordinaire, who takes care of such things for me, and has been there since the very beginning!