Some fluff, some info

topics covered:

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Hi, GE.

I am your target audience. I wasn't on the distribution list for your GE ecomagination Resoure Manual, but some of my colleagues here at [name of think tank] were. Perhaps you didn't like my last post discussing your ecomagination initiative. But I'll overlook that little slight and send you a helpful little critique. The executive summary: efficiency and environmentalism are not identical.

First, when sending a thick, heavy binder about how you're saving the planet, use recycled paper. At the least, we econazis like to print things on both sides of the page; knowing that the whole thing could have been half as thick just sorta screams of waste. Shiny paper doesn't even hold ink very well, so I can't even use the back for scrap paper. And if you'd used plain binding instead of the three-ring binder, maybe you wouldn't have needed the heavy cardboard mailing box.

Better still would have been to just put the darn thing on a CD. Then I could share the text with readers, instead of just telling them about it like I'd just seen a movie and am acting out the good parts. Only the ones who are really interested in the rhetoric a corporation uses when attempting to influence policy will read on, whereas if I had a link you could have gotten your glossy message out to the hundreds of people who read this page and randomly click every link.

At least you provide a link for the PDF of your 2006 Citizenship report, whose eco-section provides pretty much the same info.

But enough about form. As for the content, you started out with a endorsement from Jonathan Lash, President of the World Resources Institute. The WRI is a think tank dedicated to helping the environment while still ensuring economic growth. That is, they're the sort of moderates that would get along perfectly with GE. Well done finding (and funding?) such people.

I know you have to sell yourself, but describing modern times as “what [GE] CEO Jeff Immelt calls `a carbon constrained world' ” is a bit pretentious. We, your intended audience, have known about this carbon-constraint thing for a few decades now. This is one step shy of President Bush pointing out that the USA is addicted to oil as if he was the first person to ever realize this. Really, the correct citation is Gaye (1971).

As Mr. Lash points out, setting measurable goals is a good thing, and you get a gold star for setting them. For our readers at home, the goals are: double investment in R&D; double revenue from green products; reduce internal greenhouse emissions; and publicly report progress. Your increased R&D is cool--presuming you mean R&D in green technologies--but there are many ways to achieve the other goals while still making the world a dirtier place. It'd be nice if some of your goals were about reducing your ground and water pollution or reducing carbon emissions from the products you sell.

Figure One: The technical details regarding GE's eco-friendly technology.

The diagrams are all very nice as illustrations, but they're not very informative. The guy to whom you sent this document was a chemical engineer for a few years before digressing to computational methods for the social sciences--he knows how a turbine works. You could have scored some serious points by showing off your engineering and how you have green technologies that nobody else has. Show us your patents. Below, you'll use lots of numbers about the savings in kWh and kg CO₂ mathend000# when switching from an unspecified baseline to specific GE product number, but that's just show if it's not followed by micro-level technical specs. As for the illustration, just leave the boxes out and let this be a graceful, bird-free illustration.

[Wind turbines are famous for killing birds by the bushel, including many endangered species. Most other diagrams in the book have a bird floating in the background somewhere.

I recently spoke to a lawyer doing the paperwork for a wind farm, and she told me that the stories about bird-killing are all told by wealthy neighbors who don't want the wind farm spoiling their view. Anybody better informed want to weigh in on the argument?]

You report that “if just 7 percent of the land area of Arizona were covered with GE's PV-165 photovoltaic modules, the amount of electricity that could be generated on a sunny day would equal the average daily electricity demand of the entire United States.” The report repeatedly makes statements of the form `If everybody using standard [type of product] switched to GE's version, then the energy equivalent of [a fleet of vehicles or a large number of homes] would be saved.' First, use of the passive voice is discouraged. You don't indicate who is switching and how you are creating incentives to get people to make that switch. Are you seriously proposing to cover seven percent of Arizona with solar cells? Second, if we replace `Arizona' in the sentence above with `your mom', you could put some much-needed humor in a rather dull manual.

Third, there's the point of comparison (from): the typical airplane, locomotive, washing machine, &c was built decades ago, and it would be sad indeed if no progress were made in reducing emissions and improving efficiency over that time. If everybody driving a 1970 Pinto bought a new SUV, emissions would be reduced.

And let me repeat, once more, that nobody is surprised that GE is working to create more efficient products. The real question is: when environmentalism differs from efficiency, which way does GE go? How does this campaign differ from an efficiencymagination campaign?

Fourth, there's the point of comparison (to): how are efficiency levels for your competitors? Upgrading from a Pinto to an SUV would reduce emissions, but aren't there ways to reduce emissions more? And forget the industry norm; is GE really on the forefront of any of this, or are there green companies that are doing better but don't have the resources to send glossy reports to think tanks? Are there other PV cell manufacturers who could power the U.S.A. by covering only five percent of Arizona? Maybe I missed it, but I couldn't find anything in your report that indicates that you are producing the most environmentally friendly anything.

I was interested to see your desalinization technology, not that the diagram helped me understand it. But it felt like a sleight-of-hand, because GE is known for its pollution of certain waterways, so I was expecting something in the water section about keeping waterways clear of high-tech plastics rather than desalinization. You even acknowledge this on the next-to-last page:

At times in the past--when much less was known about how to protect our environment--we have been at odds over how to address historical contamination of waterways and other issues. Some of those disagreements continue today. But we have always acted responsibly, within the guidelines of the law, and done what we believed was in the best interest of our shareowners, communities, and other stakeholders.

... Let's be clear about this: GE's obligation is, first and foremost, to our shareholders.

In your citizensip report, you claim as one of your points of environmental progress in 2005 that you “Reached an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency on dredging the PCB-containing sediments in the Upper Hudson River”. As the country song goes, you're trying to have your Kate and Edith too. You can either fight the EPA for years in the hopes that you'll get off without having to clean up your mess, or you can brag about how cooperative you are with environmental efforts, but doing both is plain old self-contradiction.

Your statement about government's role--

...We believe that the government can provide leadership by: clarifying policy, committing to “market mechanisms,” promoting diverse energy sources and encouraging an American energy gameplan.

As a digression, I certainly agree about your statement about how government needs to clarify policy. We had a White House advisor over last week:

Me: Mr. Advisor, if I may speak broadly, scientists hate Bush. What is President Bush doing about this?

Advisor: I don't know why that's so, because he doubled funding in hydrogen cell research.

Me: But they still distrust him. And doesn't that seem like too little too late?

Advisor: He doubled it.

[Just to clarify, this actually happened, and most of the room was frustrated by the advisor's refusal to honestly discuss Dubya's alienation of the sciences, mostly preferring to defend the President's preference of the religious right over the fetus-killing scientists. But the dialogue above is a dramatization.]

We're all pretty tired of the lack of a serious energy policy from the US government, so amen to you, GE PR.

However, I would like to see more from you. Nobody anywhere really prefers inefficiently achieving goals over efficiently achieving them, but the question of what those goals should be remains, and is unanswered by your Resource Manual. Are there conditions where you would recommed steps that would reduce demand for your products? Power companies do this all day long: my electric bill always includes a little flyer reminding me to turn off lights and check my furnace filter. But it seems your goal of doubling profits from green products makes it impossible for you to advocate reduction of energy-using goods.

You advertise how much more efficient your trains are than automobiles, but then you also brag about your plane engines, which are orders of magnitude less efficient; would you press governors for more spending on passenger rail? You mention the cleanliness of nuclear power, but why aren't you pressing for this in your PR (instead of burying it on the last few pages); are you lobbying government for this? If you're really interested in environmental efficiency of all types, and not just vending energy-efficient products, why is there any continuing disagreement over contamination of waterways at all?

So there you have it. Is GE more ecofriendly than its competitors? Is GE aiming to reduce energy use or just talking people into spending money replacing their old Pintos with new SUVs? Is GE willing to accept or recommend restrictions that would force its hand into not using certain toxins? I had these questions before reading your report, and I encourage both of my readers to ask these questions of any corporate eco-PR they should come upon. You've omitted answers in the information you sent to the think tank, and the fact that your reports are silent on issues of non-energy pollution, the potential for government imposition of CFC-like bans on especially onerous environmental problems, and how we will actually go about covering seven percent of Arizona with solar cells indicates that you have not yet jupmed the gap between efficiencymagination and ecomagination.

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Your refrigerator works just like an air conditioner, except it is running all the time, year `round. So it's worth getting one that isn't too very consumptive. And you know what that means--math!

In October `04, when I first moved in but wasn't all here, my house was consuming 3.2 kWh per day. That gives me an upper limit on how much my fridge is consuming every day. If you don't have a refernce point like that, the EPA makes it e-z for you to measure the cost of your fridge by model number.

The usual shopping site lists a decent fridge (freezer in a sensible location, water dispenser to minimize extraneous door opening, stainless steel cover, which, as you will recall from a previous episode, adds $5,000 to the value of a house) at $1275 minimum. Down at the bottom of the page, the fridge self-reports that it consumes 494 kWh per year, which is 1.35 kWh per day. [A kWh is a kiloWatt hour. A Watt is a measure of how much power your appliance is consuming in an instant, and a kiloWatt is a thousand of those. If you let a 1kW appliance run for an hour, it has used 1kWh. For example, a 100 Watt bulb, run for ten hours, would use 1kWh.]

Through the magic of subtraction, that means that buying a new refrigerator will save me at most 3.2-1.35 = 1.85 kWh per day, or 675 kWh per year.

Adding up all the haphazard service fees, I'm paying 14.4 cents per kWh, which is up from 6.94 two months ago, due to the debacle that is Maryland's electricity supply.

Multiplying out, that's a savings of at most $97/year, which means that buying the new refrigerator doesn't make sense cash-wise.

But what about environment-wise? BGE's energy sourcing page tells me this about how much waste my usage spews into the world:

Emission Type	Lbs. per MWh
Nitrogen Oxides (NOx)	2.59 100.0 %
Sulfur Dioxide (SO2)	8.49 100.0 %
Carbon Dioxide (CO2)	1292.03 100.0 %

That max. savings of 675 kWh = 0.675MWh means that keeping an older fridge means 872 pounds (395kg) of extra CO₂ in the world.

Now that I've calculated that number, I'm not sure what to make of it. Should my environmental conscience be shocked? Wikipedia, citing a now-defunct link to the USDA, tells me that the average person exhales 0.9kg of CO₂ per day, or 328.5kg per year. Thus, my upper limit for the savings on a new fridge is that it would be equivalent to one fewer adult floating around, breathing. But, again, is this an actionable savings?

Bonus appliance

So I recently picked up this electric kettle (Amazon link) and have nothing but praise for it.

I suppose the USA just doesn't have the culture of tea that the rest of the world has. The typical convenience store in Taiwan (and I'm told the rest of Asia) includes a huge array of add-hot-water options, like tea, coffee, ramen, soup, et cetera, plus cups and a big hot water dispenser. There's iced tea in the refrigerated section if it's too warm for the hot stuff. 7-Eleven is getting there, with a decent ramen rack and coffee, but still has a ways to go in the sheer variety of things one can do with hot water. But there is just oh-so-much that hot water does for us.

To put it simply, the electric kettle brings me joy and efficient warmth. The kitchen doesn't warm up from lost heat in the least, the way it would if I were running the stove. It warms up faster as a result. There's a water gauge on the side, and I know my favorite mug takes two cups and pasta needs five, so I don't boil excess and then pour heat down the sink. Since it turns itself off when the water boils, there's no energy loss as it hits me that the water's boiling and I walk back from the other side of the house to the stove, and therefore my time spent at the other side of the house is not nearly as stressful. If I put on water for pasta, and then forget for half an hour, that's OK, since the insulation is decent and it all comes right back to boiling in about ten seconds. Of course, the seven minutes of pasta-boiling is as normal. Maybe I'll switch to capellini, which cooks in three.

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In all these columns of alleged pontification, I have given you almost no grandiose predictions about the future. There was the loom, the printing press, the internal combustion engine, electricity, the digital computer. What is next to completely revolutionize how human civilization looks?

Solar power.

Or, more specifically, the gathering of ambient energy into useful form. This is not a new idea. Millennia ago, people worked out that their bodies produce heat, so if they put on a blanket, then they can retain that heat and put it to useful purpose. The water wheel went along similar lines: hey, there's energy in that water flow, and it could be put to good use. A hundred years later, that water wheel turned into the Three Gorges D*m.

Or if you'd like to be a little more technical about it, there is the Seebeck effect: if there is a temperature differential between two sides of a system, then current can be produced from that differential.

So what's the revolution? Why am I talking about solar power instead of more water wheels or wind farms? Because light is everywhere power-sucking devices can be found. Your solar calculator from high school didn't need batteries, wires, or petroleum. It just sucked in energy from the world, and converted it into a useful form. You carried it around, and it ran itself. When all our appliances, houses, and transportation are capable of that self-powering trick, that will be a revolution.

Your laptop is not too far from that right now: you can already buy solar panels that will power your laptop that are about twice as big as your laptop. With a not-insane amount of work, we could get those solar panels down to the size of the back of your laptop screen. And forget laptops: the real victory will be when your car and house take in as much energy as they put out.

Figure 1: A square meter of solar panel could produce about 150-250 watts of energy. Black dots indicate the surface area one would need to meet all expected energy needs in 2010. source

A square meter of the earth is beaten with about 1000-1500 watts of solar energy all day long--and thanks to greenhouse gasses, there's only more watts to be had. For comparison, my fridge is sucking down a maximum of 3 kWh per day = a constant rate of 125 watts. You can check your laptop's power supply, but I'm guessing it's somewhere around 50 watts--but it won't need to be plugged in anyway. A space heater runs at around 1500W. So you can see that the typical house's energy needs are likely smaller on average than the solar energy hitting the roof.

The Honda EV Plus (PDF) uses about 500 watt-hours per mile--and that's 1999 figures from the DoE's Idaho National Laboratories; we can only presume that they're doing even better now. So mean demand is about 500 watts, and the 2 m² of car-top is warming up with 3000W of energy.

And hey, where is a great deal of the energy in driving the car's motor going? That's right: heat. Add some tricks to use the heat differential between the top of the hood and the bottom of the hood to reclaim electricity (that Seebeck effect again), and you've got an even more robust self-sufficient system.

Reality

The first is cost. Those nifty solar panels for the laptop will cost you $250, so they're not going to make sense to anybody but total hippies and those who are frequently off-grid. Putting a solar array on your house's roof will still be in the ballpark of $40,000, which will pay for itself in electricity saved and/or sold to the grid in, oh, a decade.

But burning dinosaurs is not going to work forever. As China and India start buying SUVs, oil in the USA and Europe is going to become more expensive, and that means people who were once on the fence will be buying more solar. Expect gradual reductions in prices as a result. The offset, though, is that silicon is getting expensive, due to increasing demand for electronic toys.

The other problem is in efficiency. The 3000 watts of power in the sunlight hitting the roof of your car still needs to be converted into useful electric power, and that conversion is still inefficient. One firm recently announced that it got its solar panels up to 22% efficiency. For solar panels, this is amazing, but to the rest of the energy world, this is ho-hum. Other forms of energy extraction typically get up to around 80% efficiency.

But I read that not to mean that solar power is hopeless, but that there's a lot of room for improvement. When a solar panel is twice as efficient and costs half as much per square whatever, then you're down to $50 for the solar collector on the back of your laptop screen--that's the price of a new battery.

8 December addendum: Silly me--the future arrived the day before I wrote this: the DoE announced on 5 December that one of its contractors had achieved 40.7% efficiency by stacking several types of photovoltaic cell on top of one another. It's still more than twice as expensive than the half-as-efficient versions, but we'll see where it goes.

So, back to pontification: what will the world look like in thirty years? It won't have wires, because we'll have moderately-sized electricity-generating gadgets to complement our ever-expanding array of electricity-consuming gadgets. The top of your car and house will have solar panels that just sit there and store up charge for your air conditioner. The whole greenhouse thing won't be an issue at all, except in terms of dealing with our predecessors. We won't be importing energy from remote locales, but just pulling it in from around us.

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Today's brief guest blog, in interview form, is with an oceanographer who works with a certain climate-tracking agency for a certain large government. In the spirit of not getting fired, she asked that I refer to her as missmeridian. This will make it hard for you to track down her credentials, so you'll have to take my word for it that when people say `we should only listen to scientists who study climate change regarding climate change issues,' they mean we need more people like missmeridian.

The context is in how we understand carbon exchange. For example, there are the carbon offset credits that hipsters are buying, and other situations where people characterize Global Warming as a simple stock and flow model: carbon comes out of our tailpipes, floats around in the air, and eventually dissipates or is eaten by trees. Temperature is just an increasing function of carbon stock.

This makes basic sense, is easy to comprehend, and is basically wrong. Missmeridian points out that the oceans are a major destination for our tailpipes' carbon, but even that isn't so simple.

MM: The rate at which oceans suck up carbon varies over time and space. The southern ocean is net suck in the summer, the equatorial Pacific is balanced unless under el niño, the north Atlantic is net suck in the spring. Search for “ocean carbon flux” for details.

B: Is it ever the case that oceans dump more carbon into the atmosphere than they absorb?

MM: Yes. Late fall is famous for that. Sunlight is decreasing at an increasing rate, and faster than temperature is cooling (due to magical properties of water). So you have heterotrophs (= not plants) eating a decreasing stock and exhaling lots of carbon. Also, several large portions of the ocean go hypoxic [oxygen deficient] in the subsurface at various times during the year (i.e. Arabian Sea during the monsoon)--this is very complicated, but basically you get a huge bloom that is eaten so fast it pulls all the oxygen out of the water column, and all that plant biomass is turned into carbon dioxide very quickly.

Also keep in mind that carbon sucked into the ocean isn't removed from play until it is exported to depth (ie under a layer that does not ventilate to the surface on the scale of centuries). Export in the dissolved phase is controversial. Particulate export is much better understood, and is pretty small: only, say, 1% of a surface bloom reaches the bottom intact in that season.

So 99% is converted to either dissolved organic carbon or gaseous carbon dioxide. The gas part may or may not enter the atmosphere depending on the temperature, solubility, partial pressure, etc.; and the dissolved part may eventually be turned into gas, or may just stick around as stale, inedible carbon for centuries.

B: So if we dump a megaton of carbon into the air, is is possible that next year that would turn into 1.2 megatons, or are we guaranteed that some percentage will get sucked into the oceans, leaving .8 megatons?

The carbon flux is ultimately controlled by the quantity and ratio of nitrogen and phosphorus in the deep ocean, which is constant over century scales (this is because biomass [sugars, proteins, DNA] grows in a mostly fixed ratio of C:N:P [carbon:nitrogen:phosphorous], which is usually 106:16:1 [the Redfield ratio]). Greater than millennial variation is possible, but not well understood. So, on a year to year basis, the ocean is in steady state with respect to C:N:P. The most likely candidate for throwing that out of whack is temperature, which controls the solubility of gases in water. See the “southern ocean iron experiment” (sofex), iron experiments 1 and 2 (ironexI, ironexII) and the “southern ocean iron enrichment experiment” (soiree) for studies that measurably altered the carbon flux. Note that these increased photosynthesis in the ocean--the atmosphere was not manipulated. I don't think anyone's done that, mostly because the ocean-atmosphere carbon flux is so delightfully governed by gas chemistry--it's difficult to squeeze a gas into a liquid.

B: You've mentioned (in prior correspondence) that the term Global Warming is misleading, because some parts of the world will get colder. Do you have any readings on why Europe would get colder with climate change?

Readings: look up “western antarctic ice sheet (wais)” and “global ocean conveyor belt” or “global ocean deep circulation.” Basically, warming (global or local) causes the ice sheet to fall into the ocean, turns off deep circulation, which is what drives the gulf stream, which is what transfers Caribbean heat to northern Eurasia. Europe freezes.

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First, you'll have to do some research, because it's hard to find out what's in those little pills to begin with, because the label on your prescription of Drugacil won't tell you what's in it. You'll probably have to ask your favorite search engine for Drugacil prescribing information. On the first or second page, you'll find the list of inactive ingredients.

There are two that are very common: gelatin (the coating of gel-caps), and magnesium stearate (the base for Smarties-type pills). Both can be made from either animal or vegetable.

Next step: call the manufacturer, and ask them the source of these items. If you actually try this with a specific drug, please leave your results in the comments, as a favor to future search engine users.

In my own haphazard research, responses about ingredient queries have included pig fat, tallow from cow fat, and our euphemism for the day: “bovine material”.

Pig fat is an especially good choice, because it offends a maximal number of people. Vegetarians, Muslims, Buddhists, Jews--close to every religion that is not Christianity--forbids eating pigs.

Now, if you take a quick walk down the non-drug aisles of your supermarket, you'll find little Ks and CrCs and circle-Us on the great majority of products, indicating that the manufacturer has made a sincere effort to ensure that the product is kosher. The reasoning is econ 101: ethics are a valuable facet of a consumer good, and people will pay more for a good they consider to be ethical, clean, or any of a number of other interrelated concepts. At the extreme, there are a host of people (many of whom are not Jews) who simply will not purchase an item that is not kosher--for those of you in micro class, they have lexicographic preferences with ethics as the leading term.

Why are drugs different?

Figure One: An extensive form game: DrugCo versus the consumer.

We'll start the figure, which is the (extensive form) game played by the drug company and the consumer. The drug company moves first, and determines whether to mix in a bit of pig's blood with every batch of drugs or to use a veg source. Then, the consumer chooses to buy or not buy the drug. Regardless of the drug company choice, the consumer needs the drug to lead a healthy life, so in both the left and right cases, the consumer will choose to consume the drug, although in the case where it contains pig's blood, the consumer will be miserable about it.

The drug company know this, and can therefore ignore the Don't consume choices in both branches of the tree. If I were doing this in front of an undergrad class, I'd cross out the Don't consume nodes with a marker--feel free to do the same on your monitor--leaving a simple pruned-down tree: if the drug company uses pig's blood, it saves .001 cents; if it doesn't, it loses that. So, the outcome will be that DrugCo puts pig's blood in its drugs despite the consumer's preferences, and the consumer buys.

There are several reasons why we get this outcome with drugs but not food. First, the cost of compromising one's ethics is fixed--let us call it -100 utils, but the value of consuming a drug is much higher than for food. Maybe a cupcake is worth 5 utils, but being free from physical suffering is worth 1,000. Micro students, you can just say that drug demand is inelastic.

Two counterpoints to this. First, most drugs are not a matter of life or death. What is it worth to take a drug that allows you to ignore a certain pain, to be less depressed, or to go to dialysis fewer times a year? Such things may or may not be worth more than 100 utils.

Second, in the case of an inelastic life-or-death choice, forcing a person into the tradeoff is insidious. DrugCo is telling the consumer you must choose between your ethics or religion, or your life. We don't even need to drag out Goodwin's law on this one. Every religion I know of has stories of past persecutions that fall along exactly this line: in the land of Wherever, the Powers that Be hated our people, and persecuted them; our people had to choose between continuing to practice our faith, or be killed. Some chose to die, others suffered the humiliation and survived. But regardless, the people who forced us into making the choice were evil.

DrugCo is different only in that its actions are ostensibly not out of spite, just disinterest. But the lack of interest in some ways makes it even more insidious. When persecutors force a person to choose between his or her beliefs and life, at least the persecutors were doing it out of equal passion and conviction. The drug companies are doing it to save fractions of a cent per pill. If our ethical beliefs are based on the goal of avoiding things that cause significant pain upon others for minimal gain, DrugCo's forcing a person into the your-beliefs-or-your-life choice is worse than that of persecutors of old, because the perceived gain is so much smaller.

The second reason we see drugs that tread over ethical beliefs, while food does not, is that medicine is given a semi-sacred status: ethics is expected to take a backseat. Jewish law dictates that it is against the law to comply with the law if it risks one's health. Other traditions have similar medical exemptions.

But the medical exemption is malleable. It's downright touching to see people with ambulatory disabilities at a religious service that requires frequent standing and sitting: many will try their darndest to stand. If you're not one for religious services, you see the same sort of dedication at sporting events at the singing of the national anthem. If a drug leads to increased comfort but is not life-saving, does the medical exemption to a religion apply? Some stand at the service and some don't; some fast on some days and some don't; some feel that they should take their synthetic heroin despite its bovine materials and others do without.

Here in the modern USA, the medical exemption to ethical restrictions applies to an even greater extent, because of how hopelessly lacking the USA is in ethical restrictions. Regardless of whether the basic thesis is true, many have claimed that medicine has replaced religion in modern societies, and there's certainly a good deal of evidence indicating as much.

The odds are very good that DrugCo's rank and file were raised in a Christian tradition. Funny thing about Christianity: it is the only religion I can think of that doesn't have dietary restrictions Your Jews, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, and Voodooists all recognize the power of consumption, and thus place ethics-based restrictions upon what a person may consume. Sorry, I don't count the rule of eating fish on Friday. I don't think even the Christians who observe this see it as much more than custom.

All food restrictions that I know of are centered around consuming of animals, but beyond that, there's no real pattern. For example, as far as I understand it, food can not be both kosher and halal at the same time: to be halal, the slaughterer must speak the Name of God when killing the animal; to be kosher, the slaughterer must be an appropriately-trained Jew, and Jewish law forbids speaking the Name of God. Meanwhile, Sihks feel that both kosher and halal slaughering techniques are inhumane, and therefore don't touch kosher or halal meats. Some folks (including some percentage of Christians) consider alcohol consumption to be unethical, but others (including some percentage of Christians) have laws that alcohol must be consumed on some occasions.

But back my overgeneralizations: I think that the average US citizen has difficulty comprehending the idea of the dietary restrictions common to most of the world's population, and tend to discount them; this is partly an offshoot of how the Christian tradition is the only one with no dietary restrictions. It's hard to explain any ethical restriction to somebody who doesn't buy the basic premise that some sort of action should be grounded in ethics. People who don't comprehend religious observance regarding food will advocate still more strongly that medical need--or even convenience--trumps religious dicta.

The doctor who originally prescribed to me a drug made from bovine materials, the esteemed Dr. LZ of Baltimore, MD, has a South Asian background, and is herself vegetarian. Hi, Dr. Z! Thanks for reading! However, she had put limited thought into the source of gelatin and magnesium stearate, being that she'd been distracted by things like memorizing the Latin name for every part of the human body. I asked her whether she would inform other vegetarian patients of the fact that their drugs are not vegetarian, and she said she wouldn't: their health is more important.

Whether Dr. Z is doing the Right Thing is an unanswerable question, rooted in another unanswerable question: is an action unethical if it is committed with complete ignorance of its lack of ethics? There's a cliché about how ignorance of the law is no excuse under the law, but some religions forgive sins made out of ignorance--but some don't. I'm not even going to pretend to have an answer here.

But Dr. Z is clearly demonstrating a belief in the medical exemption to ethics. It makes sense that she'd place focus and priority on the medical, because she chose medicine for her life's work, and spent several years memorizing the Latin names for every part of the body. The same will hold for most of the decisionmakers at DrugCo. Getting back to the question of why food manufacturers care about kosher certification and drug makers don't, the consumer choosing a food is basically doing it alone; the consumer choosing a drug has a legion of medical authorities inserting their opinions. This is how it should be, because drug choice involve specialized knowledge and has potential consequences that are not relevant to the choice of cake batter. But it is hard to unbundle the amoral factual information with opinion on the medical exemption question. Hey, at the extreme, Christian Scientists are often required by law to accept a medical exemption to their religious beliefs.

Having an agent makes feedback difficult. The cake batter company can directly ask consumers--the people holding wallets--what their preferences are regarding ingredients. But DrugCo does not care about what consumers want: they care about what doctors choose for their patients. The game regarding cake batter is an infinite back-and-forth, where the company chooses its ingredients, consumers choose to buy or not buy, the company responds to that choice, et cetera. For drugs, the loop is one way: DrugCo chooses its ingredients, and gets only limited and filtered feedback regarding whether the consumer at the other end is happy or not.

In this respect, those annoying consumer-targeted ads about how people should ask their doctor for Pillizene are good, because it indicates that DrugCo wants patients as well as doctors to like the drug.

But it is of limited good news, because of the information problem. The US Food and Drug Administration requires that consumers be informed of what's in their food in a clear, standardized label, but has no such requirements at all for what's in their drugs or booze. I have no idea how the FDA reconciles the several standards, but that's the law, and it's a simple fact that it is much more difficult to ascertain whether a drug follows a person's dietary restrictions than a food.

And, of course, DrugCo wants it that way, because knowledge in the hands of consumers can only reduce demand. So does everybody else: those labels are a constant battle between information revelation and information hiding. E.g., the European Union has the amusing compromise that food manufacturers must list all ingredients, but may do so in an encoded form.

Summary paragraph. I think it is unethical that drug companies are putting boiled pig bones in their drugs: it gains them little benefit at the cost of distress for those with certain ethical beliefs, like adherents to almost every known religion. Some of our most powerful stories, both fiction and real human history, are about people who force others to choose between their religion and their life--and the person forcing the choice is never cast as very nice.

On a less subjective note, there are systematic reasons for why this is the case with drugs, but not with food. People are expected to compromise their beliefs for the sake of improved health. Information about how drugs are made is kept close to DrugCo's chest, while federal law requires that other manufacturers of comestibles reveal such information. Oh, and there's room on the market for both kosher and non-kosher cake batter, but the patent literature indicates that it is good and beneficial that drug manufacturers are typically monopolists, who can present a single take-it-or-leave-it option for drugs people may be dependent on to live. All of the above leads to a lack of the sort of feedback other healthy markets rely upon when they choose how to make products that make consumers happy. As long as a drug company knows that it can force consumers to eat boiled pig bones (and that doctors will back them up on it), it will continue to source ingredients from boiled pig bones.