Comments JMG has made

I have a master's from WSU ... this is really sad.  Like Michigan State, Washington State is apparently more of a corporate research facility with some sports teams than a university.

The (then) Northwest Environment Watch (now Sightline Institute) published a great book called "Misplaced Blame: The roots of the population growth in the Northwest."

I think it's out of print but available through the Sightline.org website.  Great book.  Short, well-written, and on-target.  I commend it to anyone who is concerned about population and the effect we're having on our resource base.

Yes, we don't want them

In yet another endless thread where car-crazed boys masturbate furiously to visions of the latest wondercar fantasies, its always about how we have to have cars very different from the cars we have.

Basically, you go to motortrend.com to find people who drool over the cars you can have today.  

You come to Gristmill to find people drooling over the cars they hope might someday be available.

The thought of not organizing society around cars is apparently just too wild.  Thus we wind up with the weird result that it's the people frequenting an environmental blog who are most adamant about how we have to keep cranking them out -- even though the wet dream fantasy cars aren't what's actually being cranked out.

It's remarkably similar to the agrofuels issue, which should probably be no surprise.  Once cornered like rats and forced to look at the science, the agrofuels boosters just shift to "it's a bridge to a sustainable fuel" mantra.  The carheads are the same way -- they insist that all the people in the sprawl complexes would starve if we didn't keep cars at the center of the universe, so we have to keep trying to make slow, incremental improvements while the earth goes to hell in a handbasket because, well, we can't make any sudden moves towards sustainability, it would shock the economy!  It's utter bullshit.  We are not intrinsically less capable of creative adaptation than were the Cubans or the people in the former Soviet republics -- the only thing that is going to hurt us is people violently trying to cling to the happy motoring fantasy.

And I already said above all the things we could ask the ex-autoworkers to build for us -- getting them retrained and retooled would provide productive employment for millions for a while--- but that's really beside the point, because even paying them NOT to make cars would be a better use of our money, because we'd stop wasting so much energy and materials if they WERE on the dole.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Read, people

Note that I didn't say stop driving.  I simply said no more new cars, which makes sense to go with the no more new pavement.

Is breaking the addiction to automobility so terrifying that even the concept of weaning ourselves off is frightening to you?

There are hundreds of millions of cars in North America.  I think we could stop pouring energy and resources into making new ones for a couple of decades ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

indeed, why can't we get along

And stop trying to prop up automobility?

Why can't we recognize that all the effort spent on trying to sustain the unsustainable is a dead loss that we will regret?

As Dmitry Orlov says, it would be better to simply outlaw new autos than to try and save the automakers, a gigantic boondoggle.

America has many millions more cars than are needed already.  We have a NEED for exactly zero new cars.  The only sane position is to stop making more of these destructive and wasteful machines.  

Once we stop making them, we can put the former auto workers to work making something of value to a low-energy, low-carbon future -- rail cars, light rail cars, trolley cars, switches and controllers for all of the above, double-tracking for all intercity and interstate rail systems, super-insulated insulated forms for residential and commercial building retrofits, super-high energy appliances, wind turbines, concentrating solar collectors, evacuated tube solar hot water heaters, etc.  

There are a LOT of needs in this country.  Cars aren't among them.  A sane country would recognize that it's bleeding to death through the open wound marked "automobility" and address that issue, not try band-aids to staunch arterial bleeding.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Dean Baker on why economists are idiots

Dean Baker has a nice, concise explanation of why economists are typically so autistic:

http://is.gd/mlBM

Gerard: But if you noticed those clues, and looking back on it, those clues are actually quite obvious, why did the vast majority of financial analysts and economists and managers for large investment funds including pensions and endowments, fail to see the bubble and its implications?

Baker: The bulk of financial analysts and economists largely repeat the conventional wisdom without ever seriously trying to assess whether it makes sense. They unthinkingly follow the conventional wisdom because of the structure of incentives in their profession. No one is going to get fired because they didn't see the housing bubble. In fact, few people are likely to even miss a promotion because they didn't see the bubble.

Economists and financial analysts are not like steelworkers or people in other occupations. They don't get evaluated based on their performance. They can mess up every day of the week through their whole careers, and this would be just fine, as long as they messed up in the same way as their peers.

On the other hand, the few economists/analysts who spoke up to warn about the bubble were taking huge risks. Of course, we were all ridiculed at the time. If you were an economist working at a major investment bank and tried to tell them that all their big money- making deals were going to get them in trouble, they would probably tell you to shut up and fire you if you didn't.

If the housing market stayed strong and house prices kept rising or just remained stable, then any economist who had warned of the bubble would be laughed off as a chicken little.

In short, the incentives are such that the overwhelming majority of economists will never challenge conventional wisdom even if they think it is wrong. They are there to hold on to their jobs, not to inform the public about the economy.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Nice assassination there, KenG

"Citing Rachel Carson is ironic since she kicked off an over-reaction on use of DDT and indirectly caused millions of deaths from Malaria."

Yes, those insanely powerful writers should definitely be held responsible for the knock-on consequences of speaking out.

Meanwhile, how shall we hold people who mindlessly recite right wing talking points responsible for "indirectly" causing climate chaos, starvation, war, famines, and disease?

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

False premise alert

Ryan says "Residents of the low-tax, low-public service suburbs were happy with their lot and expected their federal government to trim down."

There were (and are) no low-public-service suburbs.  That's the point --- the carburban boom times was all about letting people live off the investments of the prior generations and enjoying their low-tax havens while getting high-public services.  The wave of carburban sprawl you are talking about was a massive wave of disinvestment in cities that redirected spending from the urban centers into the '-burbs (sub- and ex-).

Carburbia and the "outer asteroid belt" (Kunstler) of exurbia require enormous amounts of high-cost services, from the collector and arterial roads needed to ferry all those SUVs around to the sewage treatment, to the elementary schools and then the monstrous junior highs and high schools larger than many colleges.  The "low tax" people in carburbia are also quite fond of low property insurance rates, so they get lots of fire stations built out there among the acres of ticky-tacky.

The low-tax, low-services area is called rural America.  The wave of plowing and destruction that winds up as sprawl is a profit-driven activity where developers harvest the gains ... a kind of arbitrage ... that results when you ramp up the demand (and supply) for services while keeping the taxes low.  The money to provide the services flows out of cities and into the pockets of McMansion developers and sprawlbuilders.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Abolish IOUs

This proposal really demonstrates that, as you say, the rules have to be changed -- starting with the idea that private investors should be responsible for deciding the fate of the earth due to greenhouse emissions.

What really has to happen is to abolish private fossil fuel utilities and drive the rate of return to zero (or negative) for all fossil fuel produced power.  If the geniuses want to make a profit, let them produce power that profits the world, rather than merely imposes their costs on society.

If we're serious about dealing with climate, we're going to have to quit asking corporations for permission.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Hmmm, try again

How is Duke's effort to get a return on avoided capital construction any different from Guido's efforts to get a return on avoided fires he doesn't have to set and trucks he doesn't have to hijack?

("Nice little shop you got here -- boy, it'd be a shame if anything happened to it.  How's about I look out for you and make sure that nothing bad happens to you ...")

I have said repeatedly that I agree with your basic premise here.  I've been quoted saying "It's better to make the bastards rich for doing the right thing than to see the bastards get rich for doing the wrong thing."  

But the bastards have to cooperate some too.  Trying to get a return on unbuilt plants is simply too far beyond the pale --- too much of No. 2, not enough of No. 4.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Acid rain not good model

The key problem, universally ignored by economists, is that the sulfur trading program is a terribly inapt model for carbon trading for a number of reasons, most importantly that

1. sulfur was an undesired byproduct of burning coal that could be (a) either be substituted by using western (low Sulfur) coal or (b) treated by scrubbers;

2. sulfur clears from the atmosphere rather quickly, compared to carbon's 1000+ year lifetime.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Krugman pwns Jindal

Could be a great movie:

The Nobelist vs. The Exorcist:
http://is.gd/kPlU

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Isn't there a law?

The "clean coal" bastards put up an ad on a political site showing Obama with a mic in his hands with a caption "We put a man on the moon" that then turned into "We can do this" which then turned into "We WILL do this" and then showed the logo "Clean Coal" and "America's Energy" or some such bullshit.

First, isn't there a law against appropriating the image of the president to use in advertising?

Second, barf.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Speaking of the Space Station

Bob Park, author and former head of American Physical Society, has a great line about the stupidity of trying to do space exploration with people rather than machines.  

He says that sending people up to the intl. space station is like putting little bank tellers into ATMs.  Absolutely apt.  All the money we waste trying to keep humans alive in space is taken directly from robotic research and satellites that could actually tell us something.  The entire "mission" of the ISS has devolved to "try and keep the humans alive."  Stupid.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Wrong satellite

NASA needs to get the DSCVR satellite up ASAP -- the one Cheney killed because it it was Al Gore's baby -- because it can confirm or (much more likely) irrefutably demolish the theory that terrestrial climate is changing due to variations in solar output.

The emphasis on finding and, worse, "managing" carbon sinks is just another in a long series of ideas for avoiding the central reality: it's the emissions, stupid.  

Gaia will do her part, as best she can, without any help from hairless apes like us.  Our job is to get the emissions down to below her carbon capture capacity, not to screw around trying to goose that capacity by meddling yet again with something we don't fully understand.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

The Great God Auto Threatens Your Children

Once again, the most active threads at Gristmill are all about trying to sustain the unsustainable.  Sad.

Nice story in the WA Post about the consequences of carhead:

http://is.gd/kn3l

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Is that the right deal?

Is this really what we want?

This element of Obama's impending energy policy hasn't gotten nearly the attention it deserves. If he does it right, it could be the secret weapon that kills new coal plants for good -- with far greater certainty than a middling cap-and-trade program.

I'm all for killing all new coal plants, but only if it doesn't delay shutting down the existing ones; a new one that is built with waste heat recovery a la Casten is still a cancer that has to be cut out, but it's more of a slow one (prostate cancer than lung cancer).

If all we can do is stymie the new plants --- the ones that would be built with 21st C. technology from day 1 --- while, in essence, making the existing pigs more valuable, then we are simply replicating the original sin of the Clean Air Act at a much more dangerous level.

Again, I'm not calling for new coal plants -- but thinking you've done anything good because you've stopped new, higher efficiency coal plants while allowing the old pigs to run is the height of suicidal delusion.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

And yet,

Yesterday, my neighborhood association declined to endorse a proposal to permit people to keep up to five laying hens in the capital of a state that likes to think of itself as Uber Green.  

Lots of concerns about "those people" who would drain the city's code compliance office's coffers with their unsightly chicken coops, letting the chickens run loose, attracting rats, yada yada yada.

Funny, a number of people mentioned how the experience in other cities is that code compliance problems drop once hen-keeping is legalized, because then people have an incentive to spend some money on a proper coop and amenities.  But, with hen-keeping illegal, no one in their right mind will spend real money on the hens that they're keeping because they know that they could have their investment wiped out by the city in a minute.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Presumes that we keep making and selling cars

As I recall, Maryland passed a feebate bill but dropped it before it ever really got rolling.  I don't know anything more than that.  Might want to look into it and find out what happened there.

The main objection --- and it's not so much an objection as a caution --- to an auto purchase feebate proposal is that it's about 30 years too late.  We've entered the bumpy plateau period of peak oil that is leading to the rapid decline phase soon enough.  As a result, our economy, which was predicated on continuous growth, is going to suffer instead a continuous collapse in waves, kind of like reverse peristaltic spasms as the earth tries to disgorge humanity.

Thus, we're rapidly going to not be making or selling many new cars at all in this country.  Rather than 15-17 millions a year, we'll probably do something closer to 500,000 a year before long, as cars return to being something for the rich.

So it's a fine idea in principle but I fear its moment has passed.

Thus, raising taxes on fuel (provided that we break the restrictions that limit the use of gas taxes to funding roads) is still probably the most effective bet -- the vehicle purchase decision is going to be a thing of the past for most Americans, so it's not the leverage point it would have been in the 70s.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Holocaust Denial

The only big lie that pundidiots like Will aren't allowed to push is that the Holocaust never occurred.  Other than that, he's free to lie all day, and he does.

The obvious conclusion is that, if we had any interest in survival, which we apparently don't, we must show that denying the Holocaust and denying that man is destabilizing the climate and chancing climate chaos

 (a) uses the same resolute refusal to engage the vast body of evidence;

 (b) begins with the desired conclusion and selects only the tiny tidbits of argument that can be spliced to support that desired conclusion;

 (c) is very profitable for people like Will, because there are wealthy interests who like the conclusion and will pay big money to have it raised again and again, to maintain a "controversy" where there actually is none in a scientific or historical sense.

Like, holocaust denial, climate change denialism has a purpose -- it's not just an aberration of sick minds.  It's a calculated political strategy and, so far, it's working well, in that all "reasonable" strategies that liberals and enviros propose fall far short of what the physics demands.  So toads like Will are earning their pay.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

We're done for

Watching Obama's dive into the toxic stew of "bipartisanship" and business as usual on steroids, I've had to confront the fact that I truly no longer think we're going to make any more of an effective response on climate any more than we're going to do anything useful about the great bank robbery of 2001 - 2009 (and counting -- this is the one where the banks rob the customers).  

We're going to screw around with cap-and-trade schemes to enrich a different set of bastards who come from the same mold as as the last set (and from many of the same Ivy League schools) and we're going to pour as much money down the drain as possible in a vain attempt to keep carburbia going, even as we turn the currency into toilet paper and the atmosphere into a thick, warm blanket.

So I'm pulling back on climate activism and am instead going to concentrate on growing as much food as I can on my 0.2 acre city lot (probably can put half of that under vegetables and fruit and nut trees).  I spent today working on my sheet composting -- manure, then cardboard, then mulch.

So I'm not going to argue with the creationists, the biofuelish, the climate change deniers or any combination of the above any more --- it just wastes my time.

I did find something encouraging recently that the foodies on Grist should know about --
SPIN gardening and SPIN farming (SPIN = Small Plot INtensive).  It's great stuff.  First hopeful thing I've seen since Obama started showing that he's just going to give us a higher class of disappointment.

http://www.spingardening.com/
http://www.spinfarming.com/

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Ruinyourfuturerightnow

http://is.gd/j4HZ

Funny, note that there is no information on biking or walking on that horrible website.  What a travesty.  I thought there was a law against spending federal dollars on propaganda (in this case, carhead).

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Won't solve "baseload"?

"Baseload" is nothing but maximum non-cyclical aggregate demand of many small loads.  "Small" solar -- particularly solar thermal, as biod points out, does an excellent job reducing baseload demand.

By putting a solar hot water heater on my roof and insulating my attic, I've not only reduced my monthly bill, but I've taken a small slice out of the aggregate demand (I have electric hot water and an electric furnace fan).  Sure, my bit is tiny, but that's the thing about baseload - it's nothing but gobs and gobs of tiny little loads rolled up together.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Why "best science" American, you ask

1. It's not anymore.  By any measure, other countries have surpassed the US in many if not most fields.

2. A declining fraction of "US" scientists are natives.  Graduate programs in science in US universities are dominated by foreign nationals.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

The big deal was soft played

The big deal is here:  

And fourth, we will launch a program called Michigan Saves in conjunction with our utility companies.  Michigan Saves will allow Michigan families and businesses to weatherize their homes and install Michigan-made energy efficiency technology with zero up-front charges.  The monthly savings will pay the cost of the improvements.

In other words, a PAYS(r) approach -- no out-of-pocket costs to the resident/business owner, with the improvements financed up front and paid back through a shared savings strategy.

THIS is a very big deal.  Omaba ought to be knocking heads together to make this happen everywhere.  This is how Van Jones gets his jobs, people stop freezing to death, and we reduce consumption.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

If you believe that Rs are just playing politics:

Amazing and Greenmom have both said, in different ways, that no matter what the Ds offer, Rs will attempt to sabotage through filibusters and then through attack ads.

If we stipulate that, then why should we care what Rs want?  In the end, if the other side won't negotiate, then the negotiation ends or you capitulate to their unreasonableness.

I suspect that the bigger problem -- far bigger -- is going to be Democrats like Baucus and Byrd, who are going to be happy to see Rs oppose Obama so they don't have to.

The other problem is that Dems, habitually trained from birth to cringe and whinge about those awful Rs and their attack ads, still haven't noticed that the Rs are about as popular as a case of herpes at a frat-sorority mixer, and fading fast.  The Dems have a moment right now where they could be wheeling out progressive policies much faster than Rs could oppose them, and Dems could crucify Rs with their backwards reactionary postures . . . if only there weren't so many Dems adopting those same postures.

Paul Krugman's latest (http://is.gd/hMsx), for example, asks "What happened to universal health care?"  We see that Obama giving in like mad on tax gifts to the rich, gifts to coal, talking about even more biofuelish insanity . . .

Maybe we ought to stop locating the problem in the Rs and talk about why Ds seem to want to be helpless in the face of their dominant legislative majorities and control of the White House.  If the Rs want to filibuster everything from now to 2010 we'll have 75 Democratic Senators and 300 House Members in January 2011.  

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Except that it's wrong

Our dependence on oil is not even going to be a problem much longer.

Our dependence on coal, on the other hand, means we are signing a suicide pact that will only kick in after we ourselves are mostly gone from the scene -- it will nail billions of our descendants though.

So far, his administration appears to be guided by the facts of political power more than the facts of physics, with the coal and agrofuels lobbies feeling happy about all the heat that dadburn ferrin oil is getting.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Nonsense

The idea that cities need public funding for art to be livable is kind of absurd.  

First, public the money would be far better spent making cities less brutal in the first place, starting with reintroducing more natural elements and taming the automobile, giving more city space over to growing food and plants and less to transporting people in motorized wheelchairs.

Second, many of our cities are awful in great part because the buildings are so awful, not because they lack doodads.  Go to Chicago and look at the beautiful old buildings --- they don't need art as adornment, they are already adorned by their design.  

For example, in Lansing, Michigan, there was a huge concrete "installation" -- one hesitates to call it art -- put on the capital mall between two ginormous concrete box buildings that would have done Albert Speer proud, right near the beautiful old classical capitol.  This "installation" apparently had as its theme a little mathematical joke in that the huge objects  -- a circular disc about one story high and several smaller pieces -- apparently had equivalent volume, or something to that effect.

I always wanted to see the pieces in a setting where you could have had some perspective on them to see if it worked as art.  Instead they dominated the space in a negative way, obstructed the view, and only contributed to making the area feel cold, threatening, and inhumane.  Luckily, the "installation" was removed and never replaced--supposedly because the parking garage below it was leaking.

Far better to spend every available dollar on better buildings, buildings that power themselves and contribute to growing food, than requiring a percentage for art.  Beauty is in the eye of the beholder but sustainability is beautiful always, and pays for itself many times over.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Walter Karp, RIP

Jon, I had purchased the four-volume Karp set but had not read it until you mentioned it a while ago -- some of the most painful, worthwhile reading I've done in a while.  It's frightening how astute an observer he was, and how little has changed since his untimely death.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

No camo

You'd think it would be possible, but, it's even worse than I suggested in my post.

In fact, in a great tribute to the tendency of mindless rules to create even more mindless attempts to enforce the rules, here's a story:

Because I do much of this book swapping, I went to the office supply store and bought a box of 100 expensive Tyvek all-white envelopes -- about thirty cents per.  Soon after, I got a book I had sent returned to me, with a very nasty, threatening (but undated and unsigned) form letter from the Post Awful, warning me that trying to use their envelopes without paying the priority or express postage was a criminal act and that I could be prosecuted for it.

I was furious, so I took the book -- which had proper media rate postage affixed, which had been cancelled, although the book was not delivered! -- to the local PO and demanded to see the postmaster so she could explain what exactly I had done wrong and where they got off sending me a threatening letter accusing me of violating the law and then not bothering to date, sign, or put a phone number on it.

It took a while, but after tracking down the idiot in the sorting center, it turned out that this person thought that the Post Office owned  Tyvek exclusively, so that all she had to do to recognize a misuse of the PO's priority or express envelopes was to recognize a Tyvek envelope.

(Now, you may ask, why doesn't the PO simply offer a media mail Tyvek envelope -- boy, there's a good question.)

The Post Office appears to be intent on living down to the reputation assigned to them by the wingnuts of the right; it's sad.  They're so busy trying to help junk mailers lobby against "do not mail" lists that they have forgotten that they were originally formed to help real people, not corporations.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Science is hard

I think what's missing is some appreciation of how difficult it is to think scientifically, even for people trained to do or use science in their work, much less for people whose jobs never involve it directly and who are constantly told to think of themselves as "consumers" rather than critical-thinking citizens.

I'm reading a really, really great book right now called "Overtreated: Why too much medicine is making us sicker and poorer" by Shannon Brownlee.  It's really a very damning, very well documented indictment of our medical-pharmacological-industrial complex, which is very science-based but, at the tip of the spear, where physician/practitioner meets patient, hardly seems to refer to science at all.  

It's quite shocking to be reminded how deeply human -- which is to say, totally nonscientific -- many medical people are, how they will continue to do things that harm or even kill people because these actions make intuitive sense, even despite published reports based on controlled studies showing that what the physicians are doing is worse than useless.  Add economic pressures to the mix and, well, you see the results all around you -- our health spending is #1 by a huge margin, the actual state of our health is right near Cuba and other poor countries.

I was going to put a post up about it when I finished the book because I think we're losing the race to stabilize the climate and save some biodiversity, despite having lots of good science around (prior comment excepted), and we better figure out fast how to start getting people not to act like people so much ... which is to say, start using that thin overlay of cerebral matter more and the bottom 2/3 of the brain less.

(The hook of the post was to be that, if "men and women of science" have such a hard time acting rationally in a profession where they have labored for centuries but only began to get results when it started using the results of science then we are making a wild lead off first when we expect everyday folks to appreciate science, especially when it conflicts with their everyday experience.)

The scary part is that we have no time for things like "improving science education" to matter.  

Someone said that there was no use waiting for proponents of classical physics to adopt quantum theory so that it could be accepted as the standard model, the only thing you could do was wait for them to die off.  I fear that we are in the same boat with respect to beliefs about atmospheric chemistry and our ability to alter it meaningfully -- there's a huge majority of people in the world who, at heart, don't believe that humans have the ability to do so even if we wanted to.  By the time events prove them wrong, it will be too late to do much about it.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

More on the the unstimulating amount of transit

in the "stimulus" package

http://is.gd/h8P4

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

P.S. Lovelock was right: global heating

I stopped using "global warming" after hearing Lovelock say he rejected the term because people think warming sounds all comfy and toasty.  He uses global heating, and that's what I refer to when talking about the rising temperature part of a destabilized climate, but I'm careful to say that the heating is non-uniform and tends to be worst at the poles, where we're most vulnerable (and helps explain why scientists' hair is on fire, even though it's difficult to perceive much change here unless you use data, which humans hate to do).

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

FAIL on Boardman

Here's what the Oregon Conservation Network sent out today re: Boardman . . . (Note the absence of calls for a shutdown):

3. Contribute to a fight to make PGE's Boardman Plant cleaner

As the leading source of haze and a dangerous source of air pollution in the Columbia River Gorge, it is time to require PGE to install modern pollution control devices on its Boardman Coal Fired Power Plant. The plant is outdated and, instead of producing clean power, is one of the biggest contributors to filthy air and acid rain in our state. It is a threat to our natural beauty and public health.

Groups such as Onward Oregon, Columbia Riverkeeper, and the Sierra Club are working tirelessly to rally the public to get involved. Join the fight - write to the Department of Environmental Quality, demanding that we clean up the Boardman Plant.

Comments will be accepted until January 30th - write today!

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

There's Mercury in that there Gold Mine

A shocking amount of Columbia River mercury (rapidly rising in the Columbia) is from gold mines in Idaho and Nevada that basically pulverize and then heat-vaporize tons of earth to get gold out of it.  Mercury, which tends to be plentiful where there's gold, is thus put into the river systems in two ways, in the tailings and also, more insidiously, through the air as the mercury is carried off as a vapor, later to condense on things, which is then washed into the rivers.  The Snake is becoming heavily mercury laden and dumps that load into the Columbia.

So, while Boardman and the cement plant are huge sources, these mines are a surprise to most people.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Montana too

http://is.gd/g8PN

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

And in the real world

We often say that the best way to reduce emissions is to get people to lose weight by cutting 2,000 - 5,000 pounds of ugly waste from most trips by leaving the car behind.

I'm all for feebates sitting atop a rising baseline though:  say the baseline is 28 mpg.  For every mpg the overall car averages below that, $200 is added to the price.  Take all the money and give it to people who buy vehicles that average better than the baseline amount, $150 per mpg.  Use the difference to support mass transit for people who can't afford either one.

Each year, the baseline goes up 1 mpg.  

Also, government should buy used cars with mpg below the baseline for scrap: any old car that has been licensed and driven in the last year can be sold for disassembly and recycling (disassembly lines to be located in Michigan and in other states with idle auto factories).  Pay the scrap value plus $25 per 1 mpg below the baseline.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Well said, Curtis

Curtis, thanks for the observations and the study.  I'm been thinking about this for some time and have just about concluded that carbon cap-n-trade is a dodge by which the powers that be hope to continue business as usual, only with bigger bonuses.

Look at Jon Rynn's tables and what you immediately realize is that even the most aggressive traders only propose involving a tiny fraction of emitters, and that every one of them will justly be able to howl about how they are "only a small contributor."  And so we're going to see lots of dodges like circuit breakers that will relax standards if prices go too high.

Obama told the WAPost yesterday that he's going to go after "entitlements" reform, which is a terrible sign unless he is ready to pull a rabbit out of his hat and propose carbon-tax-and-rebate, because otherwise the bloodshed caused by fighting over social security and medicare --- in the wake of having shoveled trillion of dollars at business with no strings or accountability --- will consume them.  The climate response will become just another policy initiative and we'll be toast.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Well said

Except that "resource efficiency" is scale-independent and is fully consistent with using up all the resources -- efficiently.  

What has to be at the core, ahead of "resource efficiency" is "recognition of resource limits" and "commitment to global equity."  Absent those, the quality of use (efficient/inefficient) is pretty much irrelevant.

I'm wrestling with an increasing fast-rising sense that we are, in fact, not going to do anything serious about climate change, mainly because we're stupid monkeys who see Chinese and Indian people as "other" and we have no intention of saving ourselves if it means letting those "other" monkeys have more shiny fruits and us having fewer of them.  That in a nutshell is where we're at:  the rich countries are programmed by their lizard brains to want more of everything, period, and then the mammal brain provides enough cleverness to maximize the pile of goodies for "our" tribe at the expense of the others.  The thin overlay of human brain is simply not in charge enough of the time to matter.

We've grabbed the shiny fruit at the bottom of the jar, but now we can't pull our paws out of the narrow neck of the jar, and we can't bring ourselves to let go of the prize because we can't overcome our programming that says we have to grab the fruit or else the other monkeys will out compete us.  Meanwhile, as we howl and pull and pull and pull, the hunters approach steadily ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

This is repulsive

Note the idiot with the George Hamilton tan from the Heartland Institute says how silly it is for us not to recognize that the sun controls the climate --- how nice that President Chimpy, in perhaps one of his fourth or fifth biggest fuckups -- though there are many contenders for the top 100 -- kept the DSCVR satellite in a crate in Greenbelt rather than in an L5 orbit so that it could resolve, once and for all, the question about how much energy the earth is receiving from the sun and how much it's radiating back -- because, you know what, it doesn't matter if the sun's irradiance declines a smidge if our emissions and the albedo decline keep trapping an ever greater fraction of the earth's insolation.  We'll blow by the tipping points and be on our way.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Nice point here

POGO notes that the comically misnamed "Department of Energy" (which would be properly known as "Department of Nuclear Weaponry" if honesty were the rule) is the elephant-that-must-not-be-named in official Washington:

Project on Government Oversight - The Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee, tasked with the confirmation hearing for Steven Chu to be Secretary of the Department of Energy, provided no information regarding Chu's plans on over two-thirds of his department's budget. According to a report by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, at least 67 percent of DOE's budget goes to nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs. This is 14 times what DOE spends on all energy-related research and development, which was the main focus of today's questions from the Committee. Dr. Chu was not asked what actions he would take to redirect DOE's $52 billion for nuclear weapons and weapons-related programs to DOE's other responsibilities: energy-related R&D; general science, space, and technology programming; nuclear security; and nonproliferation efforts. "How can the Senate confirm Dr. Chu without having heard a single thing about how he plans to run the vast majority of the Department of Energy? This is a case where the Senate has left some pretty important questions unanswered," said POGO's Executive Director Danielle Brian.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Now, don't be shrill

If the number of trees goes down, the price will go up and the market will create more and give us just as many as we like.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Alas

The usual route to maturity is through adversity.  I'm guessing Americans are going to to get a whole lot more mature in the next 20 years.On McKibben wonders if U.S. is mature enough to confront climate change. posted 10 months, 2 weeks ago 7 Responses

Thanks, anyone

Good link.  I had not seen that, but it's pretty consistent with everything I've heard.

Max: I wish that sardonic line weren't so true.  It's been the realistic perspective for decades now.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

E-waste not the only issue

The e-waste piece is not the only issue here by far -- I look with horror at acres of movie-sized monster screens being sold all over America, and I think about the difference in California's great ability to conserve in 2001 vs. it's difficulty in 2006 (hint: think giant plasma screens, often several per household).

I guarantee that when the grid fries and blacks out several or many states one hot summer soon, the talking hairballs on TV are all going to go "Why didn't anyone warn Americans that amping up on big screen TVs was a bad idea?"

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Yes

And when someone suggests that, I'll call you for the witty retort.

In the meantime . . .

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Or how about

Because carbon taxes (or the equivalent, tax relief for non-carbon sources) has a far better chance of making a difference in countries like India?

See:  http://is.gd/f350

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Utility regulations distort decision

Sean, we're not saying the same thing because I know (and I know you know) that the cost of fuel is ultimately irrelevant for regulated utilities, who simply pass it on.  The actors with discretion and incentive to change are coal mining firms and power users (not producers, i.e., regulated utilities).  

The burden should be applied directly and most heavily to the actors who are initiating the problem -- the coal extractors.  Some share of costs will then flow forward towards power users, helping provide them with an incentive to reduce their use.

Compared to power plants and power users, there are very few points where coal is extracted.  There are zero games that can be played to avoid a tax at minemouth or railhead.  The carbon tax on a railcar of coal can be calibrated precisely (perhaps with adders according to the BTU and sulfur content of the coal) and collected with ease.

If this doesn't work to reduce extraction, then there's no way that a weaker signal (fed back to extractors from a tax levied on consumers -- which would necessarily invite a lot of game-playing and expensive calculations to figure out what percentage of purchased power was derived from coal) will work any better.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Sun in a Bottle

Link:

http://www.powells.com/cgi-bin/biblio?inkey=2-97806700203 ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

You object too much

Sean, you wrote, about a suggestion that was only made in your head:

I was responding only to the suggestion that I have some ulterior motive to advocate for downstream regulation other than reducing atmospheric CO2 concentrations as quickly, and with as little economic pain as possible.

But what I said was that INDUSTRY favors taxes at the combustion point (rather than extraction).  If I meant to accuse you of having an ulterior motive, I'd do so directly and explicitly.

Meanwhile, I think you are wrong here:

If I've got your concern right, (e.g., that if we're still pulling it out of the ground just as fast, it will get burned anyway), then I think it's misplaced.  The guy who suddenly finds it painful to generate CO2 has a strong incentive to do any number of things to lower that pain, from switching to lower carbon fuels to enhancing the efficiency of his process (e.g., producing less CO2 per unit of production). Note that all these activities necessarily lead to less demand for the upstream resource.   The only exception is if the combustor instead invests in some sort of CO2 sequestration scheme.  Setting aside the lousy economics of such an approach compared to the other ways to reduce CO2, this at least is still reducing CO2.  This is the benefit of downstream pricing.

Since the 1970s, the world has become much more efficient overall.  Alas, energy demand has not been reduced in any absolute way, only relative to projected demand from the prior, less-efficient use.  Worse, more of the world's energy comes from coal.  Pricing schemes that rely on supply-demand feedback to reduce the rate of coal extraction are simply too weak and too slow because the increased costs to the user, when fed back over the whole production chain (and, in a sense, spread over over the capital investment in that whole chain) put the burden on the least effective actors with the fewest good options (homeowners, etc.)

Putting 100% of the carbon levy on the first extractor --- the company that commits the world to suffering the consequence of introducing the fossil carbon into the biosphere --- puts the cost instantly right where it belongs, and makes the actors with the resources (the capital) to make significant system changes face the question of whether to continue down that line or to use their capital to provide energy in a way that avoids the levy.

I'm afraid we don't have time to wait for the feedback to reach the mine mouths; in fact, it may already be too late.  But we have to stop burning coal as rapidly as possible; striking at the root of the problem (coal extraction) is much preferable to hacking at the millions of branches.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Gar is right

Actually, putting the tax at the point of the individual purchase decision--which, for power consumers, is much less a decision than the enactment of decisions made long ago by others--is, I think, a tactic that industry favors because they feel it will generate great resentment towards government and the tax while affecting their operations and profits the least.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

The climate crisis in a single sentence

Bob Wallace sez:

That's today, which is what concerns me, not 20, 30, 40 years from now.

Thanks for clearing that up.  The several billions of people who are going to suffer immensely harder, poorer lives so that you don't have to make any "lifestyle" changes won't just have to gnash their teeth and curse "those people" at the end of the 20th Century and the beginning of the 21st.  Now they'll have a name.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Meanwhile,

The major Iowa paper shows complete and utter denial, ensuring that we'll have more ethanol-fueled politics until the last polar bear dies and the last food riot tear gas blows away.

http://is.gd/eiPi

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Meanwhile

Pretend-green Oregon wants to do away with the gas tax and charge a mileage tax.  

This way, big heavy polluting beasts will pay the same for using the roads as tiny, high-mileage cars.

Oh, and instead of just having an efficient, low-admin cost tax applied with every gallon of hydrocarbon fuel sold, we'll need a huge new infrastructure of GPS units so that we can reduce the tax on hydrocarbon use!

That's some brilliant thinking there, Vern.  

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Not only ....

is "stimulus" money going for roads, but it's apparently going to be Christmas all year round for sprawl-building, if California is any guide:

<http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-transpo31-2008dec31,0,3768851.story>http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-transpo31-2008dec ...

Advocacy group criticizes California transportation wish list

The state plans to spend 31% of federal road money on creating new capacity instead of addressing long-deferred maintenance and repair projects, the group says.
By Patrick McGreevy
7:39 PM PST, December 30, 2008
California officials are counting on Washington to inject billions of dollars in transportation money to help revive the state economy. But a public advocacy group said the state's wish list of projects would undermine efforts to repair and modernize the state's crumbling infrastructure and reduce U.S. dependence on oil.

The California Public Interest Research Group reports that the state plans to spend 31% of road money on creating new capacity instead of addressing long-deferred maintenance and repair projects. By contrast, the group said, Massachusetts would commit 100% of its road funds to repairs.

"We can't afford to waste precious resources on new highways at the expense of ready-to-go projects to repair and maintain existing roads and bridges and expand public transportation," said Erin Steva, a spokeswoman for the group.

The group also faulted the California Department of Transportation's list, saying that only 37% of the funds would flow to public transportation. The group called for a higher percentage, citing the record ridership on California's mass transit systems, which have been hit by severe cutbacks in recent years. The proposed percentage is less than what is being planned in Tennessee, Wisconsin and Massachusetts, CALPIRG said.

Caltrans spokesman Benjamin DeLanty defended the list, saying that it was an initial response to a request from members of Congress for possible projects and may change as federal legislation and state needs evolve.

"We note that the list provided included a fairly even distribution among capital, maintenance and mass transportation projects," DeLanty said. "However, that list continues to be a work in progress and is not definitive."

<mailto:patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com>patrick.mcgreevy@latimes.com

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Working people shouldn't be taxed on consumption?

What is the meaning of your comment about "remember, working people pay this tax" -- does that mean it's a bad thing?  

We tax working people from the first dollar for social security, and then, to top it off, we CAP the earnings taxed to support the same program, the most important social safety net program we have.  When you earn more than about $105k (I forget what it is this year -- it's indexed), you STOP paying social security, so you see a nice little bump in your check, a little reward for doing well.

If you want to help the working people in this country, you are not doing it by maintaining their dependency/enslavement to auto by keeping the price of driving artificially low.  

The low-elasticity of gas in large part reflects its tremendously low price; it's not as if elasticity was some universal constant that is independent of the underlying price curve -- it definitely increases as prices do.  We started to see a lot more behavior change from $3.75 to $4.00 than we will from $1.75 to $2.00.

It would be pretty easy to jump the gas tax sharply then put a gradually increasing floor under it, and use the money gained to pay for transit alternatives, and rebate the money to the working poor through the Earned Income Tax Credit --- heck, we could even do quarterly e-filing for people who are in line for the EITC, the same way the self-employed folks have to make quarterly tax payments.

Also, if we simply print huge new sums into existence without finding a sensible revenue source to pay it back over time the working poor are going to be hammered worst of all because hyperinflation is going to destroy them.  

It's time to get off the pot and start listening to the "navel starers" who have been trying to talk about green tax shifts for several decades at least -- even when that means that people without much money have to pay more to act in ways that hurt the environment.  

Our system is to tax (discourage) precisely those things we claim to want (income, earnings, labor, investment, savings) while letting liberals do the heavy lifting in fighting off consumption taxes because "they will hurt the poor."  Meanwhile, corporations and rich people laugh at the stupid liberals and call them useful idiots because they fail to notice that the industrialized democracies whose policies are best for the poor and the environment ALL tax the hell out of consumption with VAT and similar taxes.  Meanwhile, we screw the poor relentlessly by slashing funding for essential services, in the name of helping them by keeping taxes low.

Great work.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

That's billion with a T right, Jon?

Because only 1.6 billion with a B wouldn't get Portland's infrastructure up to "adequate," much less Oregon's ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Peak oil is not the disaster, per se

Peak oil is simply pulling a bunch of cards out from the bottom of the edifice.  After all, "peak" means the greatest abundance of oil ever.  Were we to respond to peak rationally, by adopting something like Colin Campbell's oil depletion protocol, peak could be beneficial ... but, that's like the joke about "Sure, I can cure your alcoholism --- but first, you have to stop drinking."

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Speaking of Kunstler

Here's some especially-relevant-to-this-topic bits from his 2009 predictions column.
http://is.gd/dVBo

The minority reality (let's call it The Long Emergency) says that it is necessary to make radically new arrangements for daily life and rather soon. It says that a campaign to sustain the unsustainable will amount to a tragic squandering of our dwindling resources. It says that the "consumer" era of economics is over, that suburbia will lose its value, that the automobile will be a diminishing presence in daily life, that the major systems we've come to rely on will founder, and that the transition between where we are now and where we are going is apt to be tumultuous.
      My own view is obviously the one called The Long Emergency.
      Since the change it proposes is so severe, it naturally generates exactly the kind of cognitive dissonance that paradoxically reinforces the Status Quo view, especially the deep wishes associated with saving all the familiar, comfortable trappings of life as we have known it. The dialectic between the two realities can't be sorted out between the stupid and the bright, or even the altruistic and the selfish. The various tech industries are full of MIT-certified, high-achiever Status Quo techno-triumphalists who are convinced that electric cars or diesel-flavored algae excreta will save suburbia, the three thousand mile Caesar salad, and the theme park vacation. The environmental movement, especially at the elite levels found in places like Aspen, is full of Harvard graduates who believe that all the drive-in espresso stations in America can be run on a combination of solar and wind power. I quarrel with these people incessantly. It seems especially tragic to me that some of the brightest people I meet are bent on mounting the tragic campaign to sustain the unsustainable in one way or another. But I have long maintained that life is essentially tragic in the sense that history won't care if we succeed or fail at carrying on the project of civilization. . . .

I am especially concerned about an "infrastructure stimulus" project aimed at highway improvement at the expense of public transit. This would be the epitome of a campaign to sustain the unsustainable. We need to begin planning right away for a transition away from automobiles, not in order be good socialists but because Happy Motoring is at the core of our unsustainability trap. The car system is going to fail in manifold ways whether we like it or not, and it will fail due to circumstances already underway. For one thing, it will cease to be democratic as the remnants of the middle class find it impossible to get car loans, or pay for fuel, or insurance, and that will set in motion a very impressive politics-of-grievance setting apart those who are still able to enjoy motoring and those who have been foreclosed from it. Contrary to what you might make of the the current situation in the oil markets, we are in for a heap of trouble with both the price and supply of petroleum (more on this below). And there is no chance in hell that any techno rescue remedy to keep all the cars running by other means will materialize. . . .

Counties, municipalities, and states will join in the bankruptcy fiesta. It would be reasonable to expect collapsing services as a result. This would be a situation fraught with danger -- of rising crime, of public health emergencies as water systems are not kept up and sewage treatment becomes unaffordable. I don't imagine the federal government stepping into every Podunk or Metropolis from sea to shining sea and propping up these services. People will have to cope with danger and deprivation.

2009 may be the point where we begin to understand what kinds of places will be more hospitable to human society further ahead. I maintain that our giant urban metroplexes have way overshot their sustainable scale and will contract severely. With all the economic hardship, we ought to expect a lot of demographic churning, people leaving hopeless places and moving on to something more promising. I believe we will see them move to smaller towns and smaller cities. The reorganization of the rural landscape into smaller-scaled farms has not begun to occur -- though 2009 might be very hard on agribusiness, given the shortage of capital and if oil begins to march up in price by late winter. Eventually, the rural landscape will require the labor of many more people than is currently the case. Whatever else happens, 2009 will surely see a massive return to home gardening as budgets become strained to the extreme. As the New Urbanist Andres Duany said recently, "Gardening is the new Golf!"

The Oil Scene

     Many were stunned this year to witness the parabolic rise and fall of oil prices up to nearly $150 and then back around $36 by Christmas time. Quite a ride. I said in The Long Emergency that volatility would be the hallmark of post peak oil because it was obvious that advanced economies could not absorb super high prices and would crash in response; that at some point after crashing, these economies would respond to the new lower oil price, resume their cheap oil habits, and build to another price rise. . . and crash again. . . in a declension of ever-lower industrial activity.
      What I probably didn't realize at the time was how destructive this cycling between low-high-and-low oil prices would actually be in the first instance of it, and what a toll it would take right off the bat. We can see now that our first journey through the cycle took out the most fragile of the complex systems we depend on: capital finance. As a result, a huge amount of capital (say $14 trillion) has evaporated out of the system, never to be seen again (and never to be deployed for productive purposes). It will be harder for the USA to rebound from the grievous injury to this crucial part of the overall system, and Europe has foundered similarly -- though the European nations are not burdened to the same degree by the awful liabilities of suburbia. . . .
      At some point, then, demand, even if slightly lower, will catch up with declining supply. My prediction for 2009 is that we will see two things occur, possibly at the same time: a resumption of rising prices, and spot shortages. I say this because the global economic fiasco is sure to produce geopolitical friction, and inasmuch as America has to import almost three-quarters of the oil we use, the prospect for trouble is great.
     The tragic part of all this, of course, is that the temporary plunge in oil prices has prompted an incurious American public to assume, once again, that the global oil predicament is some kind of a fraud. Given the flood tide of fraud they have been subject to in banking and investment matters, I suppose you can't blame them from thinking that everything is some kind of a scam. Given feeble car sales this season, there are reports that an increasing percentage of those sold now are are trucks and SUVs. . . .

In the meantime, there are still those who hope (as described above) that various alt.energy systems will insure the continuation of our Happy Motoring habits. This is an idle hope, and 2009 will be very sobering for those who imagine that hybrid cars, or electric cars, or "air" cars, or any other kind of car technology are going to save the day. Even if President Obama mounts an "infrastructure stimulus" program, it will not keep up with all the necessary routine road repair that our highway system requires. The extreme financial hardship faced by localities and states insures that they will have to postpone a lot of expensive highway maintenance -- even if the federal government fixes a big bunch of bridges and tunnels -- and so we face the interesting prospect that our roadway systems will enter their own deadly zone of systemic failure even before the whole car issue is settled.
     I am waiting to see whether Mr. Obama will undertake a restoration of passenger railroad service. I've said enough about this in the past, but it's worth reiterating that a failure to get comprehensive passenger rail service going will be a sign of how fundamentally unserious we are as a nation. . . .

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

On Making Bulgaria look good posted 11 months ago 14 Responses

One more vital thing

Order the DSCOVR -- the "GoreSat" that Dick Cheney iced to be launched ASAP.  This is the satellite that would, conclusively, debunk the "solar variation" theory of climate change (or, possibly, provide evidence for it, although the chances of that are vanishingly small).

3. DSCOVR: INFORMATION EMBARGO BREAKS DOWN.
An extensive study relating the information that could be obtained from the Deep Space Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) to that from the National Polar-orbiting Operational Environmental Satellite System (NPOESS) has just found its way into the sunshine. This hugely-important study not only confirms the Earth-observation potential of the Lagrange-1 vantage point, it's the first crack in the wall of secrecy that has kept the DSCOVR scandal hidden from the public. Eight years of critical data on global warming has already been lost while DSCOVR languishes in a Greenbelt, Md dungeon. Its sin was a thing with Al Gore. Another unreleased study finds the cost to launch DSCOVR, already built and paid for, would be a small fraction of NASA estimates.
http://is.gd/dObf

1. POLITICAL RETRIBUTION: DEEP SPACE CLIMATE OBSERVATORY KILLED.
Triana was never able to overcome its roots. NASA has quietly terminated what may have been its most important science mission. Critics of programs to limit emissions argue that climate change is caused by solar variation, not by atmospheric changes. There is one unambiguous way to tell: locate an observatory at L-1, the neutral-gravity point between Earth and Sun. It would have a continuous view of the sunlit face of Earth in one direction, and the Sun in the other, thus constantly monitoring Earth's albedo. Al Gore initiated the observatory project in 1998 to inspire school children with a continuous view of climate unfolding on our fragile planet. It was even given a poetic name, Triana, the sailor on the Santa Maria who was first to sight the New World (WN 24 Jul 98) . But Triana's importance to climate research, perhaps Earths biggest challenge, was not recognized until later. With urging from the National Academy, it was finished in 2001 and given a new name. It was still waiting to be launched when Columbia crashed. By then we had a new President and a new "vision." It was put on hold. The official reason for killing it is "competing priorities." The priority is to replace Gore's vision of the world with the Bush vision of sending people back to the moon. We should all weep.  http://is.gd/dOcx

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Funny

In other words, it seems to me, the Chinese could solve this problem by providing the population with a safety net, with a national health system, social security system, and unemployment benefits. And then they could even buy U.S. goods and services.

How about the US provide those things in the US?  We have no national health system and skyrocketing health problems, we have destroyed our public health infrastructure, we have an overall health index score that ranks down below Cuba, and the lack of a real health system is distorting and destroying our economy as people are impoverished by any job interruptions that make them "pre-existing conditions" if they are able to find work with health coverage again.

Our social security system is pretty good at keeping the poor alive, barely.

Meanwhile, our unemployment system is no longer seen as an insurance benefit to help people weather the ups and downs of capitalism (and to help allow them to keep spending, which moderates those ups and downs) --- rather, business has succeeded in turning the system into an adversarial one where the unemployed are presumed to be lazy cheats trying to milk the system for the oh-so-generous benefits.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Study of comedy

Great comedians have been discussing why "Bulgaria" is funny there in a way that, say, India would not be for decades if not centuries ...

Twain said that analyzing comedy is like dissecting a frog -- you don't always find what you're looking for and it doesn't do the frog any good.

My guess is that, to American ears, Bulgaria is funniest in that sentence because of the surprise factor.  It's one of approximately 180 countries that we (as a people) give absolutely no thought about from day to day, so there's the surprise element.

I don't think Kunstler is hostile to the descendants of the Bulgars or says that they are "corny" -- just that America is actually not the place its stupified inhabitants tend to think it is.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Kunstler is a sunny optimist

Dmitry Orlov, author of "Reinventing Collapse" is Kunstler without the optimism:

See his 12/23 guest post from Michigan:

http://is.gd/dxaZ

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Another awesome feat of citizen uprising

The guy in the UK was cool, but we've got a hero over here too.  This guy rocks:

http://is.gd/dnTT

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Using a knife to eat peas

I suspect that these ads -- the whole notion of a mocking TV ad -- is misguided from the start.  As you note, mocking comparison ads work because the alternative is offered within the ad.

Ultimately, this ad could have a place within a large stable of ads, run in heavy rotation, on selected outlets that reach a targeted audience -- the kind of audience that increasingly no longer exists thanks to the fragmentation of the info-spectrum (500 channels, TiVo, XM/Sirius, the intertubes).

Instead, it's a weak vessel for bearing a non-message.

You want an ad that works and is cheap to make and air and that would get a lot of free repeats in coverage about the ad?  Get Al Gore to do a standup against against the "earthrise" photo (40 years old this month) with this script (or something similar):

<ital>
  "We're losing the war against climate change.  

  "The special interests, led by the coal industry, are beating science in the battle for your attention and your understanding.

  "That's why we're not all sure that there is problem, or that we're contributing to it, or that we could stop if we were.  But there is.  We're driving it, but we can stop it.

  "The thing is, we don't have much time.  We have got to be the first society to switch from using a basic fuel like coal before it runs out.  If we don't, our future is likely to be as black as coal.

  "If you agree that we need urgent action, go to stopcoal.org or call the number on your screen to get involved.

  "And if you don't agree, go to climateskeptic.org or call this number.  You will be connected to real experts in your area who have volunteered to answer your questions with respect and to help you understand the issues and why we must act today.

  "Do it today.  We haven't got a minute to lose."
<ital>

You could do posters with a picture of Al and the script, it works on radio and the web, etc. etc.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Misreading Kunstler

Susanna, I think it's much more accurate to say that Kunstler foresees a world returning to a pre-abundant energy state rather than advocates.  He has made a number of comments suggesting that he sees nuclear power as essential.  People have a variety of views on that, but I don't think anyone would say it amounts to calling for a return to a pre-industrial state.

Nor have I ever heard him call or read anything where he calls for a reduction in life-expectancy.  

Funny that you say it's dreadfully unrealistic to expect people to give up autos --- autos are fantastically expensive, polluting, and require copious amounts of hard to access materials to produce, yet in the main are used for trips where bikes and walking are good replacements.  It's not unrealistic to note that, in the 20th C., government policy was strongly pro-auto and that it all but killed mass transit and even biking and walking as serious modes of transport in the US.  Thus, it's not unrealistic to expect that, when the pro-car policies are reversed, the car's dominance will change dramatically.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

The Fragile Chariot of the Gods

Bob writes:

It seems to me that lots of greens are starting with the proposition that "cars must die" and then look for reasons why.  (And I give K the blame for starting people thinking that way.)

I start from the premise that Americans who have (and everyone else in the world who has or expects to have) a car will greatly resist doing away with cars.

This doesn't compute, to borrow your term.  If people love cars so much and will "greatly resist doing away" with them, then either greens aren't people or your premise is mistaken.  

And isn't it odd that a mere "buffoon" would be able to "start[] people thinking" in a way that suggests that the "love affair" with the auto is more than anything else a creation of Madison Ave. creation (plus a remembered affection for a time in the US when the future seemed endlessly bright, resources seemed endlessly available, and hunger was something discussed in terms of China and India).

In other words, if this machine, this chariot of the gods, is so beloved, then why do so many people find that its costs far outweigh its benefits, and why would a mere buffoon find an audience for his jeremiads?

Growing up as a suburban kid in the 60s, a small paperback I found one day amidst the books was a little book from the 50s called "The Insolent Chariots."  (Googling tells me it came out in 1958). Google also provides some words from the dust-jacket:

The Insolent Chariots

"Once upon a time, the American met the Automobile and fell in love. Unfortunately, this led him into matrimony, and so he did not live happily ever after."

This is a book about what America and the automobile have done to each other.

Do you ever wonder why today's cars look the way they do, and why they cost so much? Is the public at the mercy of Detroit? Or vice-versa? Are the new highways drawing the nation together -- or are they merely homogenizing it? What goes on behind the facade at your friendly dealer's, and when you buy a car do you know how to penetrate the Byzantine snarl of auto "financing"? Is our marriage to the automobile part of our greatness, or is it a disaster -- and what can we do about it, anyway?

Wielding a rapier tipped with wit, edged with anger and forged with the facts, John Keats slashes aside myth and chrome, to reveal the truth behind our fateful match. Whether you want to get a horse or settle for a horse laugh -- you will never again look at your car yourself, or your native land in quite the same way... (Excerpt from fly leaf)

In other words, Kunstler is not the first to notice that our "love affair with the automobile" more closely resembles Michael Douglas's experience in "Fatal Attraction."

Despite reading and enjoying the Keats' book, I grew up with the typical uncritical acceptance of motorhead, buying my first car before I even had a license using money saved from washing dishes in a restaurant and mowing lawns.  I know I sure didn't start life with a "cars must die" mindset.  I grew up in a neighborhood where a teen 16 or older would rather have gone to school naked than in the school bus (a/k/a "loser cruiser").  

I took that car with me to duty stations across the country, never quite wanting to notice that the costs of insurance and repairs did more to keep my bank balance on low than anything else I did, including developing a real fondness for bourbon and beer, which I indulged greatly without ever reducing my driving much.  I get a pit in my stomach whenever I think of the number of trips I took home from bars, three sheets to the wind, in the woods over windy rural roads.  I easily could have killed someone other than myself, and I'm forever grateful that I didn't.

Drinking, driving, and dying were a big problem in the military.  We used to have to attend a lot of mandatory education about alcohol abuse in those days -- which led me to say "If you're going to learn about something, learn from the pros," and boy, were we ever the pros of alcohol abuse.

When I got out of the service, I had an experience not unlike that at the end of Lord of the Rings, where the hobbits returning to the Shire can barely recognize it because it had become an ugly wasteland.  And, for whatever reason, I was able to note that, essentially all of the ugliness in what had once been indescribably beautiful land was there because of or thanks to the automobile.  The land was covered with a scabrous sprawl of concrete; the air was now dangerous (literally) and had a distinct petroleum scent; the water was spoiled at every point, burdened with oil, gasoline, and antifreeze.  The first signs of the obesity epidemic were present -- between the new thing of "cable TV" and MTV and automobiles, kids didn't seem to do much involving their own muscles any more.

I didn't read or hear of James Howard Kunstler until the late 90s; he didn't put some weird loathing of automobiles into my head.  The only thing Kunstler has done is get a tiny few people to look at ALL parts of the bargain we've struck with automobility and motorhead thinking -- the slaughter on the roads, the destruction of the natural environment AND of the human-scale civic environment.  

The thing that always suggest to me that Kunstler is really onto something is the rabid scorn he generates from people who disagree with him -- it's always far more venomous than simple disagreement merits.  What it seems to be is that people in the First Church of Carburbia hate him because he's heretical, and not because he's in the main wrong in his critique, but because he's right.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Well, Bob II

Probably by the same process that we all decide to post comments at Gristmill, i.e., thinking we have something to say that might be of interest or useful to others.

In Kunstler's case, the number of people willing to pay hard money to read his books or travel to hear him speak indicates that, to a large degree, he is correct.

Kunstler may seem a buffoon to you, but from where I sit, of the two of you, the better case is the one being made by the person who is willing to point out that there is no magic pony to replace oil, which means that there is no source of magic pony urine that's going to let us stay shackled to infernal combustion engines or to keep propping up carburbia.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Planes

Plenty of oil (kerosene) available for necessary flying -- which is to say, about 1% of what we currently do -- once we electrify ground transport, which is NOT hard, having been pretty well understood since, oh, about 1900 ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Don't forget

That the federal gas tax only goes to perpetuate automobility and that, in every state I know of, gas taxes are constitutionally (!) restricted to funding roads for cars.

So gas taxes are just about the worst subset of carbon taxes there are, because they provide so little in the way of the funds needed to get out of the auto trap.

The nice thing about taxing oil at the wellhead/import pier is that it avoids these problems while having the same result as a gas tax (higher pricing for gas use).

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Illogical conclusion

@ DR:  Only if exhalation were a bad thing that had to be (and could be) stopped.

Littering just isn't that bad an analogy -- like using fossil fuels, it's a voluntary, chosen behavior.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Note the pull

Note the call to build "charter schools" in the burbs, and "national service centers," whatever the heck they are.

Hate to break it to him (since it will be lost on him) but the biggest problems in the burbs is going to be dealing with all the gigantic empty big boxes.  The sprawlplex is costly to serve because of the many square miles devoted to the major American Idol called "Free Parking."  Now Mr. Burb wants to take even MORE money from the cities (still reeling from the disinvestment and destruction of the interstates) and give it to the burbians.  What a moron.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Great post

Well said.  Thanks.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Granholm a very poor choice

Jennifer Granholm has no credentials or experience that would make her a good pick for running DOE.  She has proven not to be a strong executive in Michigan.

If you want a white female Democratic Gov to run DOE, you absolutely couldn't do better than Christine Gregoire, who knows one hell of a lot about how dysfunctional DOE is because she's had to sue them so many times over their determined "Operation Footdrag" at the Hanford nuclear facility.

Most people have no idea that DOE is a hollow agency, with 80% of its budget really going to fund things that DOD offloaded onto it (nuclear weapons work and cleanup).  The best thing that could possibly happen is for Obama to appoint someone familiar with but from outside the DOE culture (like Gregoire) and to order them to come up with a plan to get DOE out of the weapons and cleanup business entirely, giving those chores to the Army Corps of Engineers and the Pentagon.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Foundations have to step up past 5%

One of the real hard issues is that foundations have become comfortable homes for well-paid staffers who think that the 5% limit is a ceiling rather than a floor.

The purpose of a charitable foundation is not immortality, it's to do good.  There is no better time to maximize the good done by each dollar dispersed than when times are hard and other foundations have pulled in their horns.

In your example, if the value of the endowment has dropped 30%, then the annual giving ought to be maintained or increased, not decreased -- hell, doubling it would be smart, because the foundation would be, in essence, buying a lot of work cheap.

People love to quote Buffett about being greedy when others are fearful and fearful when others are greedy -- yet we automatically assume that foundations should simply let their giving ride the 5% of endowment curve up and down, causing whiplash and devastating the sectors that the foundation is nominally supposed to be building.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

If they're so good ...

Then why do we have "to work to ensure biofuels are sustainable?"  

And why in hell are we pouring money into subsidizing something that even its biggest fans keep inadvertently admitting is not sustainable?

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Good on you

Good for you, Bio-d.  Thank you for your stalwart efforts and your tireless refusal to let this issue drop down the memory hole and into "business as usual."

Environmentalists have been turned into accomplices for a great crime, where people on the margins across the world are literally starved so that rich people in the US can continue their energy trance by telling themselves that agrofuels are "green."

This afternoon I watched Oregon's Secretary of State, Bill Bradbury (strongly rumored to be interested in running for the open Governor's chair in 2010) give his slide show (Bradbury was the only elected and was one of the first 50 trainees in Al Gore's efforts to spread the message through others by training them to give essentially the same kind of show portrayed in An Inconvenient Truth).

He finished up by glossing over Pacala and Socolow's wedges, picking a bunch, and by saying that "I look at those and I just don't see anything too hard."  That's when he mentioned "biofuels" for the first time, but he did it again later in the Q&A when he talked about how E. Oregon farmers were getting religion on climate change in part because they are getting a bunch of windmill leases and growing biofuels.

He didn't point out that Oregon has added an enormous subsidy ON TOP OF the federal subsidies, or mention the state's huge budget hole, or the fact that the latest result of Big Green's work in Oregon has been to lure a COAL-BURNING ethanol plant to Oregon (Snake River Ethanol, in Nyssa), so that we can ship corn from the midwest to Oregon to turn Wyoming coal into ethanol.  He didn't mention that Portland's transit service is paying $6.75 per gallon for biodiesel.

So, consider what it means that, among politicians, people like Inslee and Bradbury are at the top of the heap.  It afraid it means that we are SO.SCREWED.  

But thanks to you and Steenblik and others for helping get the word out.  We may, as Churchill said, eventually do the right thing--once all the other alternatives have been found wanting.  The question is whether we'll be blowing through positive-feedback tipping points before we get Big Green and the subsidy ranchers to let go their death grip on the Legislatures and Congress.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

No dog?

Excuse me--someone selling voluntary carbon offsets claims to have "no dog" in the carbon tax vs. cap-and-trade fight????

When you are an old, old man, if you work at it relentlessly from sunup to sundown, seven days a week, may you have managed to do one-tenth as much good as Nader did before age 40.  

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Being hanged in the morning

concentrates the mind wonderfully.  Ford is walking a very narrow path -- a tightrope almost -- and doesn't have much cushion for screwing around.

GM believes itself to be too big to fail and still, after all this, has an enormous amount of fat and waste that keeps them from seeing how desperate their situation is.  You would expect them to have problems being as realistic as Ford, and they do.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Great juxtaposition

Between this and Joe (450 is the best we can hope for) Romm's latest counsel to capitulate in advance to avoid defeat later.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Easier to stop things than start them

Debra, the judge is probably not the crank here.  The basis for issuing injunctions is not whether the judge likes the person seeking it, or supports the program being enjoined, or hates it, or whatever.

Any enviro assessment like an EIS is subject to challenge.  Big EISes are even more so, especially on procedural grounds (i.e., the substance is fine, but the rules weren't followed along the way at some point).

While it's a pain when a project you like gets held up by an objection to the substance or process for an enviro assessment, remember that providing opportunities for such challenges is the whole point of making agencies do them.  If the public couldn't raise objections---and enjoin further work until those objections are shown to be baseless---then the assessment process would be simply useless paperwork.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Victory Chickens

Thanks, another good post on the horrors of the industrial food system.

It just shows the insanity of the zoning laws that forbid people from keeping a few laying hens in their yards -- laws that a few of the more progressive places are relaxing.

What we need -- along with Victory Gardens and clotheslines in every yard -- are "Victory Chickens:"  a movement to get people (and zoning boards) to encourage householders to keep a few hens around for eggs, pest control, and fertilizer.  And those hens can be given to the food banks or missions when they're ready to give the final measure of devotion to fighting these industrial food nightmares.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Grow a spine

I'm astounded that you would suggest that we concede in advance.

How about Obama have Hilary help negotiate the strongest possible treaty that actually seems likely to solve the physical problem on the ground at the pace dictated by the physics (which are bad and getting worse) and then present it to the Senate and then, if they don't pass it, he's got a golden issue for getting more Democrats elected.

What is it that Democrats drink that dissolves the spine this way?

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Politico still doesn't get it

Note the use of the term "climate change advocates" --- now that is a term that should really only apply to the coal lobby.  Instead, it's being used the same way that "abortion advocates" is being used to trash people who don't think the government has any business deciding whether a woman must carry a pregnancy to term.

People who advocate for a clear understanding of physical reality aren't "climate change advocates" and deniers and confusionists aren't "skeptics."

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Yeah, well

Just let her get wasted on cocaine and saturated with liquor every day and night until age 40 and see how articulate she sounds.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Actually

The key point is the last paragraph:

The problem with the arguments against all of these proposals for more pollution in LDCs (intrinsic rights to certain goods, moral reasons, social concerns, lack of adequate markets, etc.) could be turned around and used more or less effectively against every Bank proposal for liberalization.

In other words, even if you agree that Summers was being satirical in proposing something as outlandish as offshoring pollution (as if we don't have a world full of exactly that), he was doing it to show that certain arguments cannot be embraced because they could equally be made against the Bank's REAL love, total corporatization of the world.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

When speaking of doing the impossible . . .

it's better to pursue the most unrealistic of the alternatives.

Time and again, people who have surmounted impossible challenges report that the most important factor in their success (beyond the specific, substantive factors particular to the enterprise in which they were engaged) was setting their sights on the absurd goals that required nothing less than destroying their old approaches and reinventing how they approached their task.

We may not get to 350 ... or 450, for that matter.  But experience tells us that a goal set too low (in this case, too high) is far more likely to result in failure than one too high.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Imports another reasons a straight tax is superior

With a carbon tax, it's straightforward to tax all imported goods based on their embedded energy and the distance/mode of shipping into the US.  So we need not see a flight away from US-made goods and, in fact, might well see a return of manufacturers to these shores, as they can essentially give themselves a huge competitive advantage by sourcing clean power and locating near their markets.

None of this happens with a cap-and-trade system.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Beware schadenfreude

Maybe, rather than assuming that it's just those zany Europeans and their inept ways, we should ask whether any system that has so many opportunities for going wrong is sufficiently robust for the problem it is needed to solve (saving humanity from itself).

Carbon trading is a Rube Goldberg/Dr. Seuss form of carbon tax.  When all is said and done, it must raise the price on carbon emissions or it fails.  It puts the people that Thomas Frank so deftly exposed as frauds in "One Market Under God" in charge of the most important program we have.

A carbon tax has the virtue of simplicity, plus we have thousands of years of experience with taxation, not so much with pollution trading.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

"Turned into energy"?

You mean burned, right?  If the filters were installed in most places, there's not much going on there (some iron), but where they have been used for a reason -- people with lead piping, etc. -- burning the charcoal means liberating any of the materials filtered into a highly mobile form.

Why is this a good idea?On Brita announces recycling program for used water filters posted 1 year ago 7 Responses

Streets are the rights of way

If you read Dmitry Orlov's work (http://is.gd/7WSD) you realize that we need a collective "snap" in our consciousness to realize that transit systems have all the surface right of way that they need now -- they're called streets.

Major arterials for heavier rail systems; smaller ones for bike boulevards.  Cars and trucks restricted to an ever smaller network of roads not being used by rail and bike networks.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

P.S.

P.S.  Whereas a US carbon tax on fossil fuels would hit all forms of carbon and drive US emissions down, a cap-and-trade system that is only US based is worthless -- it would impel US emitters to use cleaner fuels while non-participants would use the coal made cheaper by reduced US demand.

With a carbon tax, we could tax imports just as hard as domestic carbon emissions -- we simply apply the carbon tax to the embedded energy represented by the imported goods (and the type of energy, based on the producing country's mix) and another component based on the distance and mode traveled.

Thus, while we would see domestic goods increase in price to account for the carbon tax paid upstream by the producer, we can also use a carbon tax to ensure that offshore producers have to participate (at least to the extent that they sell into the US market).  We might even claw back some US manufacturing jobs.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Why coal rather than electric-power-segment

Max, thanks for the question.  The point I want to make as I revise this is that anything that lets coal emissions continue or increase (such as reductions in use of natural gas as its price goes up, which would have the effect of creating a tradeable offset that would allow more coal to be burned) is bad.

Another point I need to add, which I've been mulling over doing as a separate piece, is about the differences in time scales.  Sulfer emissions return to earth quite quickly, so the problem doesn't linger much beyond the emissions.

But CO2 stays in atmosphere for centuries; I have zero confidence in our ability to actually see carbon reductions from things like reductions in natural gas, because of my certainty that we will certainly burn all the oil and natural gas we can get our hands on.  If we, meanwhile, burned the coal, then the net result will be business as usual.

Only by limiting coal emissions trading to coal emitters can we actually set a cap on coal emissions that is meaningful.  If we allow coal to trade with other industries as you suggest then it will let more coal be burned:  as those industries become more efficient and less greenhouse-gas intensive, instead of seeing the benefit, the world's climate will only see more coal burned as those other industries sell their offsets to the coal industry (meaning, sell the "right" to burn more coal).

We need to recognize that coal is special; because of it's destructive capacity and abundance, coal is the hydrogen bomb of climate chaos.  By letting all other industrial users trade (or just regulating them with a carbon tax, which would be preferable), we allow them to optimize their energy profile.  

But we cannot optimize our use of coal any more than we can employ battlefield nukes and expect anything short of total destruction.  

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

We Must Care More for the Caps than the Trades

I submitted this as a post but I see I could just as well have dropped this in here, so I will.
===============

Why we must be more concerned about capping emissions than trading them.

If there is one thing that the recent financial debacle should have taught us, it's that risk cannot be managed by slicing it up, putting the pieces in a blender and reducing them to a fine purée, and then pouring the resulting mixture into 1 million little bowls that, supposedly, represent a finite amount of risk.

In fact, the meltdown gives us another chance to learn the ancient wisdom of the market: never invest in something you don't understand.

All across the country, representatives of the same institutions that brought about the recession we're enjoying now, the worst economic climate since the Great Depression, are peddling emissions trading schemes, popularly known as "cap and trade."

The claim is that one of these trading schemes, applied to sulfur emissions from power plants that caused acid rain, solved the problem. That's debatable, but there is evidence that the sulfur emissions trading system did work to bring emissions down quickly and with the minimum of fuss from power utilities.

If we stipulate that the emissions trading scheme worked with sulfur emissions, does it not follow them that we have the right model to use for getting carbon emissions under control?

Absolutely not.

In fact, it's the differences between the sulfur trading schemes and the proposed carbon emissions trading systems that tell the tale.

First, there are a finite universe of emitters covered under the sulfur emissions trading systems.  Essentially all acid rain problems are the result of coal burning utilities in the Midwest. So there were a finite number of sources, and they were large, fixed sources.

Second, sulfur emissions are not part of everyday life for millions of people, the way carbon emissions are. The whole sulfur trading system relied on a handful of professionals in a handful of utilities, all operating in background, invisible to the everyday person.

Third, the cap for sulfur was a hard cap, in that non-participant (non-emitters) couldn't monkey around with the system and earn sulfur emission allowances that they could sell  to utilities that had were intended to exceed their emissions limit.  

But with carbon trading, the cap is a porous thatched roof, rather than a hard cap.  With carbon trading, the ideas that utilities in large industrial emitters will be able to purchase additional allowances --- in other words, to produce more emissions than allowed --- from non-industrial and nonutility emitters. This requires the creation of an elaborate (baroque even) system for estimating the carbon reduction potential of a bewildering variety of methods for either reducing emissions or trapping carbon and keeping it from entering the atmosphere. In the acid rain program, it would be as if utilities in Ohio could earn the right to amend additional sulfur by paying Boy Scouts to dump alkali minerals into lakes in Vermont and upstate New York because the pH in the lake wouldn't drop so much.

The only way to carbon emissions trading system can work to actually limit and then reduce greenhouse gas emissions is by restricting the universe of potential trading partners to similar entities. In other words, coal users (such as electric power plants and coal-burning facilities such as ethanol refineries) would only be able to purchase coal above their own limit by buying emissions allowances from other coal users.

This is critical, because coal is the make or break for climate.

There is little doubt that all of the world's oil and natural gas that can be economically recovered and delivered --- meaning those reserves that can be exploited at an energy profit, which translates into a monetary profit --- will be. However, climate models based on reserve estimates suggest that there is simply not enough carbon in these fluid fossil fuels to send our climate into a runaway greenhouse state.

Alas, there is more than enough carbon in more than enough places with more than enough coal to blast past the climate tipping points multiple times over, sending our climate into a chaotic new state the likes of which we have never encountered during the periods of human habitation and beyond.  

Ultimately, that means that the Earth can only afford a carbon trading system that distinguishes between otherwise identical emissions, and that creates a special sub-system for coal emissions.  All other greenhouse gas sources can be lumped together and traded if we wish or, more simply, efficiently, and elegantly, taxed on their carbon content.  But coal is different.  With coal, we must be much more concerned about the cap on carbon than on the trading scheme.

The lesson from the sulfur training program is that when a hard cap is applied to a fixed, limited universe of emitters, those emitters will operate to stay beneath the limit at the lowest total cost, letting those emitters that can make the greatest reductions at the lowest cost to do so.  

But there are no phony offsets in sulfur trading: the only way to get allowances is to reduce emissions, either by removing sulfur from the smokestack or by burning coal with less sulfur to begin with. That is the strength of the system -- there is no way to have total omissions to exceed the cap thanks to offsets that are justified on paper by a calculation showing that Action A in India or South America would have the same acid rain reducing effect as a reduction in sulfur emissions in Ohio.

The world has very little time. If we want any hope for a stable climate in the future, we must reduce emissions radically, such that greenhouse gas concentrations no longer increase at an increasing rate, as they do today. (Or at least as they did before the economic meltdown reduced energy consumption globally.)

Today, we are rapidly approaching 400 ppm equivalent carbon dioxide concentration, increasing at 2-3 ppm per year. James Hansen of NASA, probably the leading climate change expert in the country and possibly the world, warns that we must get a house gas concentrations to less than 350 ppm carbon dioxide equivalent as rapidly as possible. The only way this can be accomplished is through aggressive, strict, airtight limits --- a hard cap --- on global coal emissions.

What we cannot do --- what the world cannot afford --- is to permit coal emissions to continue or to increase under the fig leaf of emissions offsets provided by non-coal users. If coal emissions continue, we don't stand a chance of stabilizing climate in anything like its present state.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Funny you should ask

Because unions do predate capitalism.  They seem to arise naturally in many cultures, where they are usually known as "guilds."  Once specialization occurs to a level that knowledge of a particular craft that is not available without special study or long apprenticeship, the members of the club work out a way to provide the service to their society while elevating their status within it.

If you like your capitalism without unions, then by all means move to China, where you can enjoy capitalism unfettered by anything but company unions.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Picks

For SECRETARY of the new ENVIRONMENTAL RESOURCES AND PROTECTION DEPARTMENT (a full cabinet dept. made up of the current Ag/Energy/Interior and EPA), Sibelius would be a good choice.

The Undersecretary for Energy could be Grumet.
Undersecretary for the Interior -- Jamie Clark.
Undersecretary for Ag, Wes Jackson.

Blumenauer is a good choice for DOT.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Nice

Nice dissection.  

Might want to reword your last sentence -- as you so often state, the status is the "real deal" for many.  They don't care whether it derives from the logo or the mileage.  I think what you were trying to say is that he mistook the source of the status (as the logo rather than he mileage).

Correct me if I'm wrong.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

GOP "expertise"

Hey, if McCain can say that Sarah Palin is one of the most knowledgeable people in the country on energy, then Newt definitely must be one of the most knowledgeable in the galaxy . . .

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

My headline was better

I don't know what happened to the humor thing that Grist was supposed to have going -- I think "Biofuel you can get behind" was better for a story about biofuel from poop ...

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

More importantly, Nobelists back Obama

http://is.gd/5ASz

Much more important than the endorsement of economists is that actual scientists, including 76 American Nobelists, prefer Obama to McBush and Bible Spice.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

I'd prefer that we "take care of it"

What we need is a solid (and gradually rising) floor on the price of a barrel of oil with the proceeds earmarked to provide transit and other alternative strategies for helping people get things done without having to drive a car.

This could include support for a greatly expanded high-speed, high-quality videoconferencing network, which needs to become a basic part of US infrastructure.  

The Post Office is going bankrupt but is one of the best distributed operations in the country and it needs desperately a new source of business now that e-mail and cheap texting is killing their old model.  

What if Congress used the proceeds from the floor on oil money to establish the USPS Videoconferencing service, where every post office serving towns above a certain size would either have internally or nearby a super-highspeed public videoconferencing facility that would serve businesses and nonprofits (or even individuals who want to connect with people at a distance) at a modest premium over costs.  Just like the flat-rate postage helped connect this country, we need flat-rate videoconferencing that actually works well to help reduce travel demand.

That's just one of the many things that we could be paying for if we put a $100/delta-$50 floor ($100 would be the minimum floor for any price of oil, and the price would adjust as needed to keep the floor at least $50 above the price of the oil itself.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Meanwhile, a Gannett rag editorializes against it

A blog post re: today's Salem, Oregon Statesman-Journal dump (literally):

Statesman-Journal disgraces itself
The Statesman-Journal completes its disintegration into a parody of a newspaper with its editorial declining to endorse the vital Cherriots bond (24-247). The concluding paragraph suggests that destroying the viability of the transit system will be useful because it will prompt a "community discussion of what an effective, efficient transit system would look like if it were being designed from scratch -- and how to pay for it."

Oddly, THAT's the discussion we should be having over our streets and bridges, rather than rushing to pump $100M into nothing but more of the same auto-dominated building. We need to be talking about how to stop spending our way into an ever-greater maintenance backlog of expanded roadways that will supposedly "reduce congestion" -- ignoring the cumulative millennia of experience that shows that all roadway expansions intended to fight congestion end up increasing that congestion at a new, more-congested level.

But, experience be damned, the SJ calls for the defeat of a $6M annual bond to preserve a functional transit system while calling for passage of a $100M streets bond that will do nothing to prepare Oregon's capital to meet the ravages of an unwinding economy that will make transit evermore vital to people on the lower end of the economic ladder, even as the climate changes make transit more and more necessary to our survival.

When the streets bond fails, nothing changes -- we can get the planners to revise their plans and come up with a new, smarter proposal without a hitch, a proposal for taking care of what we have in a way that we can afford.

But if the Cherriots bond fails, real people will be hurt real bad real fast. Transit dependent workers will have no options at all on weekends; seniors and the disabled will lose all ability to get around independently on weekends, and commuters and other "choice riders" will give up on the system.

In short, as we starve the transit system, we'll complain that it's a scrawny, useless thing and short-sighted folks like the SJ editorial board will then argue that we should cut the funding even further because the system is so scrawny that it doesn't do anyone any good.

    Transit levy creates quandary for voters
    Request ill-timed with school and fire measures on ballot

    October 27, 2008

    In today's challenging economy, voters can't afford to do everything. That is why the Statesman Journal Editorial Board cannot recommend passage of the Salem Area Mass Transit District's $30.4 million, five-year operating levy.

    The district is going back to the voters after its levy failed twice in 2006, forcing route reductions. The current proposal creates a quandary for voters.

    On the positive side, the district is doing a lot of things right under General Manager Allan Pollock. Cherriots has increased fares. Ridership is up. Pollock has a tighter rein on operations and has instituted money-saving measures. He appreciates the need for more crosstown routes instead of making so many riders transfer at the downtown Courthouse Square transit center.

    Yet there still seems to be a disconnect between the Cherriots' elected board of directors and many taxpayers.

    The property-tax levy has support among downtown business leaders but not communitywide. Taxpayers see nearly empty buses going by and wonder why; the district's own trip statistics don't give a satisfactory accounting.

    The district raised hackles by how it handled the potential siting of a transit center in Keizer. Stories abound of bus drivers' perceived discourtesy to other drivers and pedestrians, with each incident creating bad feelings toward the district.

    The 2008 levy is smaller than the 2006 request, which was defeated once by voters and once by the double-majority requirement. However, we think the board made a tactical error by placing this year's levy on the same ballot as Salem-Keizer School District and city of Salem bond measures, as well as operating levies for Keizer Fire District and Marion County Fire District 1.

    Those conditions created long odds for the Cherriots levy, despite the regional importance of transit. Many taxpayers worry about the uncertain economy, which has worsened in the months since the district proposed the levy.

    The proposed levy is small -- 49 cents per $1,000 of assessed home value. That's $98 per year for the owner of a $200,000 house. But taxpayers must prioritize their expenditures, including their property taxes.

    Some people have suggested that the transit board is politically tone-deaf -- unaware or unable to build support among civic leaders.

    We prefer to think that board members are so passionate about transit -- for good reason -- that they count on others to share their enthusiasm. They have led a grass-roots campaign, holding scores of meetings.

    If the levy fails, the district has warned bus and CherryLift riders to expect an end to Saturday service, as well as weekday reductions on many routes. Those could be devastating to service-industry workers, students, people traveling to medical appointments and others who depend on public transit.

    But this also could force a community discussion of what an effective, efficient transit system would look like if it were being designed from scratch -- and how to pay for it.

The 5% Project Let's live on the planet as if we intend to stay.

Prophets without honor

Your post is just in time to note the Oregonian editorial board* saying "We LOVE wind -- just not off our (sacred) shore!"

Too perfect.

http://is.gd/4GSN

(*God's constant proof of the dictum that the intelligence of a group is inversely proportional to its size.)

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typo

thats "nukes stuck belowdecks on birdfarms" (carriers).

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Not quite

"The root" of the problem is not the housing collapse -- the housing collapse is the symptom of the national devotion to continual growth divorced from exertion.  

In short, if there is "a" root to the multiplicity of crises we are just now becoming aware of, it is the belief that there is this one thing called "the economy," the size of which can grow without regard to the underlying energy and material flows that were once measured by the amount of wampum that moved around.

Speaking of frames, remember that when you buy into the frame of "the economy," you've already bought into the idea that there is this one thing, measured by the usual metrics (GDP, GNP, etc.) that presents the same aspect to everyone, and that we all participate in.  This is nonsense, however.

The triumph of finance capitalism is that it creates a panoply of economies, in which those who are wired into the game can profit handsomely despite the impoverishment and immiseration of millions (or, now, billions) of others.  Textbooks suggest that this should not be possible, that a breakdown in the economic situation of many people should undermine the situation of the elites, sooner or later.  

But finance capitalism breaks this connection and provides a soft playpen for the the masters of the universe to manufacture money and shower it upon themselves, all without the dreary bore and bother of producing anything useful to anyone.  Thus, even as America is collapsing in real terms (infrastructure, literacy, lifespan, access to health care, inequality, etc.), the finance capitalists have done quite well, thank you.

The only reason that the housing crisis is a crisis for them is that it means the music stops and whoever is left holding all that toxic paper has to eat it -- but, wait, look over there!  The taxpayers will ride to the rescue!!!  Hooray!  By selling the kids and grandkids of America into debt bondage, the salons in DC can both ensure a steady flow of campaign contributions in perpetuity AND a chance for themselves to join the elites inside the glossy bubble of finance capitalism.

In terms of the environment, the crisis is this:  once you overdrive the planet's resources long enough, cracks and crevices begin to appear in the biological web that cannot heal on anything less than a geological time span.  If you continue to overdrive the thing -- to consume much faster than the regeneration rate, to exhaust in days the energy stores built up over eons, to saturate pollution sinks in hours that need centuries to process the wastes -- you eventually wind up with your phony measurement systems (beans, wampum, currency) losing all connection to physical reality.

[If our money supply was shrinking at the rate our resource base was (as it should, if we actually wanted anything like a sustainable economy), then you'd REALLY see a crisis, because it would be first and foremost a crisis for those whose primary activity is the manipulation of these phony currencies that we've come to rely on.]

The 5% Project

If speculators are responsible ...

. . . then why is the price of oil dropping fast, precisely consistent with the behavior of a commodity at the absolute edge of supply/demand balance?  If speculators had the power to drive up the price of oil a few months ago, what changed to take their power away?

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Profit is the payment for risk

Great piece, Sean.  
There's a guy who works for the Wisconsin PUC (if the utilities haven't taken a contract out on him yet) who gives a great presentation on why we've been overly generous to utilities for decades.

In a nutshell, PUCs have been granting utilities exorbitant rates of return based on the assumption that the rates needed to attract capital are those paid to someone who holds only that single investment --- but, of course, nobody only invests in a single stock.  Utilities are held by huge funds that invest in a whole portfolio of stocks and the utility stocks have the great virtue of being countercyclical to a bunch of other things (driven more by weather than most other things), which means that the overall risk of the portfolio goes down, justifying lower ROI rates.

Bottom line--as we make the risk of utilities go down towards that of savings bonds, the ROIs should approach that of savings bonds.  Right now most IOUs are getting 11-12% or even more, which is a huge scam on ratepayers and a huge unearned windfall for shareholders.

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True of almost all new ventures

There's nothing unique about new entertainment ventures losing money for the first or first few tries, particularly when launched during tough economic times.  Music festivals in particular demand a lot from an audience (time, money, travel) that is relentlessly sought after by a whole variety of industries, seeking to part them from their discretionary entertainment dollars.

Don't blame the green touches, in other words.  If a  promoter can't absorb a big loss or two while making a reputation and building a base of happy attendees who will market through word of mouth then he/she probably needs to go find more backers or get out before those losses occur.

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In what universe?

In what universe can nearly all detached structures be retrofitted to be zero energy?  

Will you come over and cut down the tall fir trees a couple houses over?  Might want to do it at night, the neighbors are REALLY attached to the trees around here, but my solar guy said that PV would never work because of all the shading, and these are really tall trees, so they're taking a BUNCH of houses out of the zero energy thing.  

And don't forget to install additional air conditioning for the loss caused by removing the trees ...

And ...

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Chopping liver further

Well, opt-out would increase participation, but only to the extent that they conceal information about how to opt-out.

The bottom line issue with green power rates is that the free riders get all the benefits of others' participation at no cost.  If YOU sign up and voluntarily tax yourself to help bring green power into the grid, then I get the same benefit that you do, and you pay the freight.

What utility commissions have to offer to break green power participation out of the low single digits is a price guarantee for participants -- that is, customers who pay the premium for green power now should get, in the same proportion as they are buying green power (10%, 25%, 50%, 100% or what have you), price protection from increases felt by non-green customers.

Once you offer that set up -- which is easy to calculate, since green power has no fuel expense that is vulnerable to market shocks -- then you will see green rates attract a lot of interest -- so much so that you could start auctioning off participation (i.e., demand would outstrip supply, so you could raise the premium a bit using auctions to allocate participation, which would raise even more funds faster to help produce more green power supply).

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Absolutely Ron

In my dealings I find that, while the cheering has died down, as soon as you suggest taking the first-generation pigs away from the trough, you are instantly back three years, listening to arguments about "bridge technology" and other lines of utter BS.

Moreover, while Big Green groups are becoming circumspect about their role in helping unleash the biofuels disaster (American Solar Energy Society runs a cover story this month about "Resolving the Biofuel Dilemma," as if using common sense creates a dilemma), not a single one has been willing to stand up and say "You know what, we were wrong to support biofuels.  We need to end these mandates, production subsidies and blenders credits so that the industry can sort itself out and we can figure out which, if any, of these are worth pursuing."  

Even the Union of Concerned Scientists, a group that I had been a member of for nigh on 20 years, refuses to follow the science where it leads and starts hand waving about what this and that breakthrough "could" result in, etc.  (That's why I didn't renew my gift to them.)

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Mandates -- they work

The lesson:  intelligent mandates work efficiently and effectively.

We don't need a "Cap and Trade" law for skyshine so that developers who want to stick in more streetlights can buy "dark sky" credits from developers who choose not to.

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Gene Tampering

If you accept Sen's point (3), then it is illogical to pursue gene tampering (4), which serves only to transfer the global common inheritance into property controlled by the wealthy, who profit by denying the poor access what was once theirs for free.

In other words, if poverty is the problem (not the supply of food), then don't tamper with genes because (a) the supply of food wasn't the problem; and (b) it makes poverty worse.

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Cash for Clunkers

Outstanding op-ed in NYT today recommending a big cash-for-clunkers program --- figure out which old cars are the worst mileage and most polluting (normally one and the same) and figure out the income limits and then give people a big bonus for turning those vehicles in to be destroyed (since clunkers are the cars overwhelmingly in the hands of the poor).

A laundry list of benefits ---
 * overall US fleet mileage goes up
 * number of cars goes down
 * worst polluting cars go away
 * a boost in scrap steel supply, lowering price
 * Some of those people will probably adopt transit or use the money to buy bikes
 * even if they buy cars, they are replacing a polluting low-mpg junker with a much cleaner, higher-mileage car
 * it puts the cash in the hands of people who are likely to spend it all, fast.

If the Dems want to stop looking like palookas in lead boots, this is a great way to go.

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America sobering up!

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/07/26/business/26ethanol.html ...

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Sobering up in Oregon

Good news!  A state senator in Oregon is coming to her senses on the ethanol mandate and vows to change it:

http://news.opb.org/article/2666-oregons-ethanol-mandate- ...

The 5% Project

EDF -- Extremely Deferential to Finance

I forced myself to read all of Fred Krupp's dismal book so I could review it here (a review that got delayed and then got disappeared, apparently unrecoverably), and I pretty much concluded that EDF is to be treated with extreme caution and that their motto might as well be "All the environmental protection the Fortune 500 approves of."

The 5% Project

Indeed

Noam Chomsky has repeatedly made the point that the American people NEVER supported any of Reagan's positions; in poll after poll, the Democratic positions prevailed, but the Democratic Party poo-bahs -- fresh from reasserting their control by torpedoing Jimmy Carter -- bent over and told the press that they couldn't possibly resist such a ravishing virile force of nature as the old Raygun.

Walter Karp makes the same point -- since 1880, it is the Democratic Party "leadership" that does most of the heavy lifting for Republican reactionary positions.

The 5% Project

Hey, a dry hole is a result

I bet we get results every time we drill!  Just not necessarily those that were hoped for ...

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Where does denial stop?

Use your own best judgment, TGM.  If in doubt, ask yourself the questions for choosing a course of action ethically:  

? What if everyone did what I propose to do?

? Am I creating the person I want to be if I do what I propose to do?

? Would I be proud to have everyone know I do what I am proposing to do?

? Does what I'm proposing to do cause unnecessary suffering?

Get your head out of "Oh poor me, I'm so abused" just because you have to think about the consequences of your actions a little.  The world isn't empty, resources are finite, and many people are already living while clinging perilously close to the edge; let's try not to feel all put out if we have to watch where we step so we don't tread on their fingers.  Give thanks that you are lucky enough to have such problems.

The 5% Project

Don't subsidize making A if you want R&D on B

If you entertain cellulosic dreams, why subsidize non-cellulosic -- corn, in other words -- ethanol production?  Why, having seen what happens when you subsidize A (you create a lobby that won't let you shift off A), would you create a state level subsidy for A, when claiming that what you really want is B?

It's not enough to say "wants to get off oil" -- oil is a problem that is solving itself.  The problem is how much damage do we do to our soil while we keep chasing the substitutionist fantasy (the fantasy that we can keep on trucking as before, only with different fuels), as Merkley and other liberals do.

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You owe me for cleanup

I had trail mix sprayed all over my screen when I stumbled on "a progressive source" and "Washington Post" in the same sentence.

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I shall, when conditions permit ...

... and when the Japanese have been verified to have been defeated in the Phillipines and the danger of their recapturing the islands has passed, return.

Inspiring ain't it?

No, it's not.  MacArthur said "I shall return."  That worked, vicious miserable prick he was otherwise.

The only problem with Gore's statement is that he isn't the Democratic nominee for president, where he would have the opportunity to smack all the little pissants who are going to, in that deeply serious and bipartisan way that all deeply serious people do in order to win the even more deeply serious approval from the obese media, make the planet unlivable for humans.

But hey, at least they got their moments on screen.  

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Ross Gelbspan

Has been documenting this nicely for a number of years, particularly well in his outstanding book "Boiling Point."

You can read him at DeSmogBlog.com, if I recall correctly.

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No change then

Back in the late 90s, the Union of Concerned Scientists tried to address this same complex of issues with its "Renewables are Ready" campaign (and book, and ...).

No soap, apparently.  They persuaded the persuadable and everyone else went about their business of consuming ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels, unchecked by responsible building codes, land-use planning, or any other of the demonized "command and control" methods.  

So the regulated utilities merrily went about pushing heated towel bars and ginormous spa tubs for the $30,000 master bathrooms that were the size of small villages, gigantic upright refrigerators that turned all the efficiency gains into doo-dads (TVs in the door!  Through the door ice-makers!  Self-defrosting!)  and the plasma screen TVs, halogen bulbs and all the other accessories of the "good life."

The reason that only 3% buy what 84% claim they will buy is that the state utility commissions have not wanted to grapple with the free rider issue inherent in green power.  People who sign up to pay more for "green" power know that, in nearly all cases, their power still mostly comes from the dirty coal plant down the road, and that their money is actually going to produce green power elsewhere for entry onto the grid.  And, for their trouble and the extra expense, the utilities promise to keep raising their rates in step with everyone else's -- in other words, there's no benefit to the early adopters.  They don't get guaranteed rate stability or any other reward for investing to add green capacity --- they get precisely the same electricity as their next-door neighbor who didn't join the green power program, and their rates go up the same.

The optimal strategy is, of course, a carbon tax that captures the externalities in power production and adjusts consumer prices accordingly.  There's no reason that people who want to do the right thing should be paying more than the people who are happy to burn coal.  Absent that, then the utility commissions at least have to ensure that customers who voluntarily tax themselves to purchase green power get some kind of reward down the road -- such as kWh per kWh price guarantee (for every green kWh you buy now at a premium, you get to buy power at that rate when the green power trades at a discount, i.e., after the carbon taxes or cap-and-trade costs kick in).

THAT would change the calculus faster than any amount of exhortation.

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Sanity good for your health

The Dutch were recently noted to have become the world's tallest people, which health researchers say is an excellent proxy for overall social health ...

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Yes, the important convention business must go on:

Denver Post A 28-page contract requested that caterers provide food in "at least three of the following five colors: red, green, yellow, blue/purple and white." Garnishes could not be counted toward the colors. No fried foods would be allowed. Organic and locally grown foods were mandated, and each plate had to be 50 percent fruits and vegetables. As a result, caterers are shying away. . . "Everything that the Democrats did got off to a late start," said Peggy Beck, a co-owner of Three Tomatoes Catering. "It was such an ordeal. We've jumped through hoops and hoops to bid on their stuff, and we had to have certain color food so the plates would be colorful." In the end, the parties that she had been bidding on were canceled to save money. "This was some of the silliest stuff ever," she added.

h/t prorev.com

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Not quite

But a nominating convention where the nominee has already been selected, yes, that should be canceled.

Edited out of my original post was a note that this applies to the GOP as well, but that the Dems, as the party of Al Gore, should be leading on this.

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Yes, Darth

I think you would want to avoid this site so as not to be one of the posters here ...

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On that school thing

And do you propose moving the schools to serve the students when the parents in the poor neighborhoods want to select the good school?  Or are you just suggesting that we create a phony choice program that will continue to allow rich whites to "choose" their superbly funded neighborhood schools with pools and fancy labs, while poor folks are allowed to "choose" to ferry their kids across town to the suburbs (way to reduce transportation demand there!) or be stuck with their "neighborhood" schools with the high concentration of first-year teachers who flee to the suburban schools as soon as possible ...

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Arrgggh

You just have to read Grumet's mush responses to know that the road gang will wind up with 99% of everything, again.  We MUST indeed "foist them against each other" -- we must aggressively support the modes with a future (electrified rail, primarily) against carhead thinkers like Grumet, who will be the death of us.

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And canals!

And why should the government be in the canal business, Jefferson!  That nonsense about creating a stronger government to promote the general welfare -- that was just throat clearing!!  

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The Scorpion in the tank for McSame

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2008/06/29/the-mclaughlin-g ...

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The Scorpion's Sting

Reading this reminded me of that story about the scorpion who convinces the frog to ferry him across the river by promising not to sting him, which he of course does when they are half-way across ... the frog asks why, and the scorpion says "Because I'm a scorpion, that's what I do."  The frog says "But you promised not to!," and the scorpion says "You knew what I was from the start."

Having watched the obese media scorpion do everything possible to shunt John Edwards to the side and rally around Hils and Obama at all costs, Obama is going to discover that they are still the scorpion, and he's not getting across the river alive if they have anything to do about it.  

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Great bumper sticker

About sums it up:

http://www.cafepress.com/edgeofthewest.278096071

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You're not wrong, though.

Sorry, but you're right.

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Not every molecule has to be eliminated?!?

Guarde wrote

Still, these substances are a tiny fraction of the GHG puzzle, despite their shared immense "radiative forcing" qualities. (See IPCC reports.) Eliminate them entirely, and we still have an intractable problem. Stay focused, not every molecule of GHG has to be eliminated. We are much better off tackling the big issues of fossil fuel dependence, sprawl development models, and personal and commercial energy efficiency.

I am having very hard time following this logic.  People here have spent hundreds of thousands of words and countless hours talking about how to respond to the climate crisis and perhaps the one thing that everyone agrees on is that activities and products that are needlessly destructive of climate need to go --- they are the "low hanging fruit" that everyone's talking about.

EVERY activity, viewed in isolation, is small potatoes.  For example, here's a link to story about doctors flying to conferences where, predictably, some idiot dismisses the concern because, hey, it's just a drop in the bucket:

http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_releases/given_a_c ...

That's just one example of millions that could be considered.  The bottom line is that with CO2e screaming up towards 400 ppm and a need to get it back down to 350 ppm, EVERY greenhouse gas emitting product and activity has to be scrutinized closely and eliminated if the climate cost is too high for the benefit.  

In fact, rescuing ourselves means we're going to have to stop doing/buying lots of things we would very much prefer to keep buying/doing.  In other words, this isn't necessarily going to be all easy, low-hanging fruit.

So, respectfully, suggesting that we ignore these products to focus on things like sprawl and consumption strikes me as bizarre.  People are having to make difficult changes to reduce their climate footprint; products like these sprays undermine their efforts and their commitment.

We are social animals.  People don't like feeling like the albino monkey in the troop.  Products like this are essentially decadent --- like felling a cherry tree to pick one cherry off the top branches --- and people who are trying to do the right thing feel bruised by these products, because they think "Great, everything I've done to reduce my climate footprint just got canceled out by that pallet of spray."

You're right that every molecule of greenhouse gases have to be eliminated.  But if we can't start by eliminating the stupid ones, it's difficult to see how we get at the hard ones.

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In Brazil, like Kenya, biofuels kill biodiversity

http://www.ens-newswire.com/ens/jun2008/2008-06-26-03.asp ...

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Bizarre

The attack on "speculators" is bizarre -- the left-wing analog to the nutjobs who blame the "high price" of oil on environmentalists or the whisper campaigns in post-WWI Germany about "those people" who "stabbed us in the back."

People can be in denial all they want, but the bottom line is that Russia (#1 producer) has peaked, that the Saudis (#2 producer) are pumping flat out and they keep dangling some magical extra barrels in front of economists' eyes to persuade people that they have extra barrels a while longer, because they lose a big chunk of power the instant the world realizes that, like the Texas RR Commission before them, they no longer have the ability to drown a competitor (and thus they no longer can set the price of oil).  The US (#3 producer) peaked long ago and it only served to make us more addicted.  Mexico is crashing, Canada has peaked and is shifting onto tar sands, Indonesia had to leave OPEC because it wasn't an oil exporter any more, etc. etc.  The big speculation going on right now is all the people speculating about speculating.

There's 336 pints of oil in a barrel.  We use 1000 barrels a second now, and China and India are still building millions of brand new first cars a year (as is the US).  Presumably those aren't museum pieces; people will want to drive those vehicles.  I don't care how good the mileage, when someone goes from using public transit/bikes/
walking to personal motor transport, their oil consumption goes up.  Oil is priced a lot closer to its intrinsic value (as a doer-of-work) at $1 a pint ($336/bbl) than it is at the $0.1 per pint ($36/bbl) that some people seem to think is the "right price."

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Speaking of corn

Christian Science Monitor:

Some coastal woes begin far inland
Farm runoff creates dead zones offshore, but no national authority is tasked to address them.

http://www.elabs5.com/ct.html?rtr=on&s=o1l,2j6l,er,8o ...

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How Fitting

Just got Robert Bryce's new book "Gusher of Lies: The dangerous delusions of 'Energy Independence'" from the library.

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The Teaching Company

For some terrific listening, try some of the courses by The Teaching Company -- typically semester-length university courses.  History works best, I think, but I've enjoyed a number of things.  They are wildly overpriced if purchased for full price, but they rotate all their catalog through a steep discount so there's nearly always something interesting at a reasonable cost, particularly given that the comparison isn't the cost of the book but rather the cost of tuition.

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No surprise

I wrote a fairly critical review of this guy's new book (Earth 2.0) and it disappeared into the Gristmill grinder somehow.  The stuff above is pretty consistent with the book---he's all about continuing to use coal, carbon sequestration dreams, biofuels, etc. etc.  The whole thing reads like a breathless WIRED or FAST COMPANY wet kiss to the wunderkind who will bring us better living through TECHNOLOGY!  Seems to have very little understanding of the difference between energy and technology or the Second Law of Thermodynamics for that matter ...

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Commons problem

Of course, the problem with the cancer metaphor is that the patient who suffers the remedy is also the one who suffers from failing to make the judicious choice to choose the short-term pain of the remedy.

In climate, on the other hand, the policy makers and the wealthy in the US (a greatly overlapping set) are still under the illusion that their wealth will buy them out of the climate crisis (as it has bought them out of most of the ills of civil society -- the dysfunctional health care non-system, collapsing education systems, overwhelmed public safety agencies, etc.) The rich have retreated to gated communities and enclaves to the point where they live in America in name only.  This would not be such a problem if it didn't have the tendency to make them view climate as just another instance where their wealth will afford them protection.

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Possibly not

I just saw a squib saying that the US still managed to edge out China in total emissions ... in other words, "We're No. 1!!!!" for one last time.

Of course, given that a huge chunk of all our imports are from China, charging them with the emissions to make that stuff for us is pretty shaky.  That we manage to lead the world in emissions while offshoring most of our emitters is an astonishing testament to our suicidal ideation.

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Nice transfer of agency

Aircraft, Cargo Ships, and Military vehicles will be wanting their liquid fuels for a long long time.

Trains too for quite a while.
(Although most of these are already series diesel hybrids.  Halfway there.)

Not to pick on Grey, who merely posted what so many others could have, but notice who the active agents are in his comment -- the vehicles who "will be wanting their liquid fuels."

This is a very revealing comment.  

We have created millions of tools but invested them with so much of our psychic energy and let them occupy such a huge space in our national consciousness that it's a regular occurrence to hear people talking about what their car "wants" or "needs."  

No wonder we are on a collision course with the brick wall named reality--we can't even decide "who" is driving or "who" gets to decide where we go.

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China is the GOP dream society

Ruled by what is basically a tiny hereditary elite, the people have no due process rights in which to seek civil justice against the government (no right to a fair hearing by an impartial arbiter, in other words), no real unions, rampant corruption, a huge army of surplus labor, and a swift bullet in the head for anyone who complains about the above too obstreperously.

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Sorry to disappoint

Space, sorry to disappoint, but my view of CBA is extremely colored by having seen it up close and personal.  I'm involved in a toxics waste response activity where the polluter is supposedly required (by CERCLA) to address the natural resource damages (including loss of use, loss of natural resource services, species losses, degraded habitats, and several other categories).

The idea is that the polluter is required, where full remediation is not possible, to value the natural resource damages and do (and pay for) natural resource restoration work -- which might mean restoring another stream if the damaged stream can't be fully remediated, etc.

However, thanks to the magic of discounting, a fundamental tool in the CBA arsenal, the value of the damaged resources quickly (30 years or so) goes to zero.  In other words, because the natural resource injury is so profound that many future generations will be denied the use of these resources, the polluter is supposed to make up for that --- but thanks to discounting and the CBA approach to evaluating the value of remediation and restoration, the polluter will pay only a tiny fraction of what the lost resources will actually cost future generations.

Ultimately, CBA is the fruit of a poisoned assumption, namely that benefits reaped by corporations today should be compared to the costs imposed on people in the future and, if both can be massaged appropriately (which, thanks to discounting, isn't hard), the result is useful in determining whether the corporation can proceed to shove its costs onto those future generations.

Oh, and don't forget the other poisonous assumption, that the world "economy" continually increases in size, meaning that you can keep shoving costs into the future because, hey, they'll be richer than we are (because the we're in an infinite growth economy) so they should clean up our mess, not us.  This has a nasty way of turning into a justification for maintaining business as usual, since anything we do that might interfere with the great god Growth is rejected out of hand -- after all, it's the fundamental basis of a money economy, where money is loaned into existence.

Rynn and Mobus (if I recall right) have made a number of posts advocating a necessary transition to a money system based on energy rather than on loans made in hopes of an ever-growing economy.  In such a system, the amount of wealth would grow each year no faster than the amount of solar energy captured and put to productive use -- effectively producing a zero discount rate, which would at least deal with the insanity of our current plan:  shoving our worst environmental costs onto the generations who are going to be inheriting a world of catastrophic environmental costs and depleted resources.

The 5% Project

Winters Graph

Jeffrey Winters' brilliant graphic non-overlapping representation of greenhouse gas emission sources can be found here (h/t to the Musing Environmentalist):

http://www.quaker.org/fep/Grid_apr2007.jpg

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Umm, actually ...

http://www.mcclatchydc.com/255/story/39634.htmlOn Vermont-sized area of Amazon may be protected posted 1 year, 5 months ago 17 Responses

Offsets only OK if time travel included

After several years of consideration (including having given money to TerraPass and then Carbonfund.org before stopping to reevaluate) I have concluded that offsets are indefensible because, even granting every benefit of the doubt, they still don't address the issue of carbon retention in the atmosphere (a huge fraction remains after 100 years and a significant fraction remains up to 1000 years).

We need a broad upstream carbon tax that is fully refunded.  No offsets, no games, no accounting overhead, just reductions.  NOW.

The only offsets worth supporting would be the ones that come with time travel, enabling those people making the reductions in the future to remove the CO2 supposedly offset before it is emitted.

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Vegetarians for Heifer

Although a vegetarian myself, my discussions with people who have gone overseas and done international development work persuade me that Heifer is well worth supporting.  

Bottom line is that Heifer is not spreading our model of industrial animal husbandry -- Heifer is basically practicing the kind of grass roots, community-based micro-scale income development work that has been shown to work throughout the world.

I've given to many international aid societies over the years, and my friends who have been there at the delivery end assure me that one of the consistent habits of people who "get ahead" in these countries is that they use their greater wealth to add more meat to their diets.  Unlike those of us in the overfed countries, people in poverty and coping with hunger benefit greatly from access to animals that provide multiple benefits (meat, milk, fiber, fertilizer).

I've thought a lot about Canis' concerns and wondered if supporting Heifer is appropriate.  In the end, I throw in with Mark Twain and say that, if Heifer is wrong according to animal cruelty standards, "All right then, I'll go to hell."

(Although no doubt well-read Canis might reply that the line I just stole is 180 degrees out of context when applied to a decision to condemn animals to slavery and eventual slaughter.)

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Interesting

I find it interesting that there's often an automatic assumption that congregate care is bad and in-home care is superior.  

In East Lansing, MI there is a really exciting place that has many levels of care from fully independent condo housing all the way through to fully staffed nursing home care.  The people we know best in that facility all chose to enter it under their own power --- nobody compels them to go into it, and they had/have the means to do otherwise if they wanted to.  Their reasons differ, but one of the main shared reason was that they like living in private rooms in a larger setting that means they had no need to deal with groceries, lawn care, plumbing, snow, ice dams on the roof, raking leaves, and, most of all, loneliness.  Because they live in this facility, they can keep socializing and even hosting gatherings although they don't have to maintain a house and they aren't able to drive.

There are wonderful benefits to increasing community based care that allows people who want to remain in their homes to do so.  But what seems to be ignored is that an awful lot of people prefer not to stay in the homes that were appropriate for them when they were younger and want a way to get the amount of help they need without constantly having to hire a battalion of assistants to do all the things that they could do when they were younger.  Different strokes for different folks, as it were.  

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Shorter Casten

Beware the Law of Unintended Consequences.  It applies to inaction as well, so you cannot avoid acting, but be alert for places where those unintended consequences are creating more problems than the intended consequences are solving.

(Nice enough post, but I think you misjudge the problem--the problem has little to do with the nature of science as a provisional enterprise, constantly being revised towards a better understanding.  It's that our policy prescriptions don't lend themselves to a similarly fluid revision.  The major criticism of a carbon tax, for example, is that you have to guess what tax level is appropriate to get the reductions needed --- apparently because our imagination is so impoverished that the powers that be can't figure out how to craft legislation that allows for an EPA administrator who modifies the carbon taxes as needed to get the reductions required.)

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What risk?

What has Khosla risked?

Biod quoted where he said he would not have risked anything on cellulosic without having the risk shoved onto everyone else, though I'm sure he will gladly reap the "profits" should there be anything left over (with the subsidies not returned, natch).

The bottom line is that Khosla has told us that he is only pursuing biofuels because he seeks to make his gargantuan fortune even bigger -- it's not a moral thing with him, he's not investing in biofuels out of a sense of noblesse oblige, he's simply another wealthy guy in a long string who devote their lives to the pursuit of even greater wealth, and who confuse the acquisition of wealth with intelligence.

He's willing to rationalize (rationalize means "to  substitute a good reason for the real reason") increasing global poverty and hunger in his quest for biofuels "profits" (scare quotes to note that these "profits" do not occur without direct cash subsidies and the even more valuable indirect mandate subsidy, which makes people buy his output no matter how worthless), and he's perfectly willing to rationalize away published and peer-reviewed scientific analyses showing that biofuels are making catastrophic climate change more of a certainty, because those studies are inconvenient for his self-myth as the noble rich guy who saved humanity in its hour of need.

JK Galbraith, in his book about the Crash of 29 and his great short book about financial bubbles, talked about how Americans see wealth as a sign that the owner is intelligent, and Galbraith, who probably knew as many really wealthy people as all of us here put together, knew that the opposite was more likely true.  People take the stupidest statements by Khosla as gospel simply because he speaks with the Voice of God, to wit, mammon.  But it's total bullshit.  Take away his subsidy and the mandate and ethanol and agro-diesel disappear from the scene faster than pet rocks.

What is astonishing is how enviros who are normally expert at recognizing how financial interests bias the opinions of those with the interests (Patrick Moore on Nuclear Power anyone?  Singer and Michaels on climate change, anyone?) go into the tank on biofuels.  Enviros used to campaign to prevent rapacious developers from raping and destroying landscapes and neighborhoods with auto-sprawl ... now the enviros are the ones calling for subsidies aimed at keeping the dominance of the auto in place.  And conferring sainthood on ethanomaniacs like Khosla, who is laughing all the way to the bank as the sheep not only line up to be sheared, but post moral defenses of him for doing it.

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Not true ...

oh, you mean like a legal thing ... well, then, you're right there.

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Aside to Gar

The candidate for Congress who got your "Cooling It" book won the nomination handily the other night, so I will be calling him soon to see if he has had a chance to skim it and if he has any questions.

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Recycline

We've been using the toothbrushes for a while now -- they're quite good.  I feel a lot better about changing the toothbrush as often as I should (I'm hard on them, apparently) when I put them back into their little plastic case and then, when the rest are all done, mailing them all back in a post-paid envelope like I do with Netflix.  I'm hoping that the NYT exposure causes them to scale up so much that they can break out of the DFH health food stores and into more normal distribution chains.

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Better framing

To break the farm-block stranglehold on farm and food policy the next time around, we need a need a new vision of agriculture: on that recognizes that farmers produce more than just food, feed, fuel, and fiber. We also count on farmers to take care of vast swaths of critically important land. What we need, in short, is a "multifunctionality" vision of agriculture.

What we need is an agriculture devoted to fertility, food, fiber, feed, and fuel, in that order.  Animal feed before SUVs, but food and clothing for people before animal feed, and fertility of the soil before anything else (or all else is lost no matter what).

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Doctors, farmers II

Even more important, doctors have very scant correlation with health, only health care costs.  

Farmers have a very high correlation -- in fact, a nearly perfect causal relationship -- with food supplies in societies that have abandoned the hunter-gatherer model.

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Trackbacks

Sounds like this is going the right direction.  The one thing I like on other sites is the "reply to this comment" button that links your reply to the comment you are responding to, so you can follow a comment thread without having to read all the intervening comments between each one.  Wonkette has a button you hit that inserts an "@ (prior commenter)" into the followup comment, and then you can just track down through those.

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LeGuin

Wisewoman Ursula K. LeGuin nicely summarized "cost-benefit analysis" in the perfect short story "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas."

It is reprinted, I think, in "The Wind's Twelve Quarters," though I could be wrong about the collection title.

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5% Solution gets 50% by 2022

Reductions of just 5% a year -- very attainable -- produce a 50% drop in emissions in 14 years.  In 2022 or 2023, if we're looking at a 50% reduction from present levels (much higher than 1990 baseline) then we'll be feeling pretty good - we'll have done much of the work needed, and the absolute amount we'll have to keep cutting will be much less than the cuts we have to make in the first few years.

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Why "or"

Is that necessarily an "or" question? Grist uses an image of three people holding onto their butts to draw eyeballs, among other tricks intended to win a glance.  

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Which goes well with ...

non-mandatory cap and trade!

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Yup, grape juice & chocolate cake

I really respect a lot of Kunstler's work, but his determination to get through his canned and oft-repeated observations doesn't work well with Colbert.  Kunstler is determined grunge; Colbert is brilliant jazz -- each one is fine, but the styles don't mesh well.

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Influence locally

Doing my bit, I just came home from a meeting with a local environmental activists' group where we had a candidate for Congress -- I gave him Peter Terzerkian's A Thousand Barrels A Second and Gar's "Cooling It" (all printed out and put in a small flexible binder with chapter tabs).  We didn't get to talk too much, but he seemed willing to at least open both, and he was pleased when I emphasized Gar's "no hair shirts" approach.

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Victory Gardens better metaphor than Apollo

The "Apollo project" metaphor is getting really old, especially since the formal variant seems to be all about coal.  But even just as a conversational metaphor it's weak because, when you think about it, what did most people do during the Apollo project:  essentially nothing, maybe watching some launches or late night TV.

Many far better ideas are in the WWII arena, where the gist of many campaigns (particularly war bond drives) was that we ALL had to act, and that small individual actions produced large cumulative results.

So, yes, we do not need an Apollo project for new wondertoys.  Far more important that we spark a storm of interest in each individual household motivating themselves around finding and grabbing more opportunities for conservation and efficiency.

The 5% Project

Legislative specificity makes it harder to twist?!

Having worked in several state governments, thanks for the best laugh I've had in days.

"Legislative specificity" means that the lawyers in the legislative service bureaus and assisting the drafting committee in the Lege and try to put half-formed concepts into legislative-ese by anticipating the loopholes that are inevitably created and how to handle the borderline cases.  Each response lengthens the legislation and involves adding additional clarifications and distinctions, each of which invites additional lawyering over the precise intent.

State courts are increasingly dominated by neandeathal "textualists" whose claim is that courts have no business doing statutory interpretation unless the statute is so ambiguous that it can't be applied.  

The hard liners even disdain to use the "absurd results" test, which they associate with liberalism (the test says that if an interpretation of the plain language causes you to reach an absurd result, you made a mistake in your interpretation, because the Legislature does not intend to be absurd; actually, it's possible that they disdain to use this test because they prefer that government be absurd whenever possible, the better to argue for dismantling and privatizing it).

Thus, the train wreck occurs when the anti-govt sentiment illustrated by worries about "bureaucratic twisting" of laws causes laws that should be one pagers to become 14 pages plus definitions meets courts who have decided that whenever the Legislature bothered to write 14 pages they must have intentionally excluded all other ideas (there's even a legal phrase for it that appears in case after case -- the expression of one thing is the exclusion of others ... in other words, if you chose to say A, B, and C, we presume that D was intentionally excluded, no matter how reasonable and useful D would be).

Anyone who thinks that "legislative specificity" nets you less interpretation and judgments by "bureaucrats" has obviously never worked in government.  The more words the Lege uses, the more words the "bureaucrats" will have to use to apply the laws, and the more words will be open to reinterpretation and challenge by the people who are affected by the laws in question.

http://oregonpeaceworks.web.aplus.net/site/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3110&It emid=241

The greatest threat

Say, what is the greatest threat to our consumerism lifestyles:

A)  A hypothesised small temperature rise in some places, accompanied by gradual sea level rises with pre-emptive coastal defences to be developed over the decades.

OR

B)  A hypothetical but more evident calamity with diminishing oil-in-ground?

The greatest threat to "our consumerism lifestyle" (speak for yourself, Wally) is the belief that it can or should be maintained despite the fact that it depends for its entire existence on a profound refusal to observe obvious ecological limits.

http://oregonpeaceworks.web.aplus.net/site/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3110&It emid=241

Hmmm, not quite

Ok, so how about if the dividend is paid via reductions in payroll (social security) taxes and then via increasing the earned income tax credit for low income earners and then via increasing the standard deductions so that fewer and fewer people end up paying income taxes?

http://oregonpeaceworks.web.aplus.net/site/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3110&It emid=241

Just came out?

Came out as what, a former Iowan?  A nature lover?  What, what?  I read that article yesterday and don't remember thinking that he had "come out" as that term is generally used ...

http://oregonpeaceworks.web.aplus.net/site/index.php?option=content&task=view&id=3110&It emid=241

Or coal

(sound of humanity shooting itself)

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

GBS was right too

P.S.  Speaking of the divine Miss T, here's someone who anticipated her nicely:

George Bernard Shaw

"The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it."

(h/t to "Quotes of the Day")

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Ooops

I guess I gotta be more clear -- yes, kmp, Gershon's book is not a (food) cookbook at all; it's more a cookbook of steps to lowering your carbon footprint through everyday measures.

And, no, it's probably not all that newsy for someone who comes to Grist regularly.  But for the other 99.999999% of America, it's a GREAT book.  Definitely does a nice job providing practical, easy to use guidance and encouragement.  If every person who already has the gospel buys and shares a couple copies of this book with family and their friends at church/work/school then we can see a big effect.

Of course such a book targets the low-hanging fruit -- but that's just good sense.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

A BTU is a BTU is a BTU

Bottom line is that farmers control the use of two finite -- very finite -- resources: land and water (access to sun comes with the land).  Once they accepted the apple from Satan and started using those to make food for machines instead of food for people, they started us down the road to where a calorie is a calorie is a calorie, whether it's in the form of food, natural gas (fertilizer) or ethanol/biodiesel (motor fuel).  

Corporate farmers care little or nothing for the use to which their crop is put -- their job is to minimize the costs of the inputs and maximize the return on sales, ignoring the long-term health of the soil (which is artificially juiced with petrofertilizers).

So they pit the stomachs against the fuel tanks and chase the subsidies, which they feed back to Congress to ensure further subsidies, an unholy alliance that is starving people to death.  That's what farm policy is to day.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

An avid fisherman comments

A friend is an avid, long-time fisherman throughout the Northwest, ocean, river, stream, creek -- heck, for all I know he fishes in his bathtub too.  He had these comments on the deal in response to my asking him what it meant that the tribes were taking the deal to support all dam operations:

There are many ways to look at this.

1.  As you say, maybe they think it's a lost cause.

2.  Maybe the tribes who settled are accepting the notion that hatchery fish are an OK substitute for wild fish, and that they can do better by focusing on hatcheries and their output.

3.  Maybe they are cynical enough to say that since the existing runs in the mainstem Columbia (i.e., the product of hatcheries and the natural fish from the Hanford reach) are doing OK, let's take the free money and run, and screw the upstream runs and the tribes that care about them.

4.  As you originally hypothesized, maybe they believe Judge Redden still won't buy the phony science and solutions being proposed by BPA, and he will do the heavy lifting by forcing BPA to manage water and maybe even remove dams.

5.  Maybe they think the projects funded by the $900 million will solve the problems and will restore healthy runs.

Who knows which is right.  More to the point, who knows how it will play out over the next decade (2.5 fish generations).

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Funny

Several people have reported that Pollan's piece has gone viral and has been one of the most read and discussed and shared articles in a long while.  Maybe we need more discussion of morals and ethics and less of economic values.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

No time to pick up that fire-extinguisher ...

I'm too busy trying to put out the flames with this rug!

I'm really mystified by this slam at what you (not he) called a "grand solution."  As I read that piece, and as I re-read the sections you quoted, I see him saying quite clearly that the fastest way to your proposed path, significant legislation, is by getting people to be intimately involved in a basic (fundamental even) interaction with the environment in a way that makes a profound change in their world view -- by growing food, by turning status-devices of lawns into portals that help people get over the cheap energy mindset.

The key figures you cite ARE all calling for significant legislation at the highest levels -- to no avail thus far, because the people who count votes for a living look at what people really DO as opposed to what they say in order to know what they really think.  And, to most people, climate change is an "issue" at most, and thus it gets, at most, lip service.

But let Congressman Jane's district fill up with people who write and say "You know, Rep. Jane, I never thought I'd do something like this, but I am so concerned about climate change and its effects on my kids and grandkids that I've taken up the lawn and started growing a lot of our vegetables.  It isn't much, but we all have to do as much as we can, and this is something I can do" and you'll really see a significant change in Jane's attitude.

I've been giving presentations on the "5% Solution to the Climate Crisis" (more info available here, including the slides http://oregonpeaceworks.web.aplus.net/site/index.php?opti ...)
and I can tell you that people are HUNGRY for some sense that what THEY can do matters and that someone is asking them to do something other than write a check that will wind up funding TV advertising and more direct-mail fundraising pitches.

I'm sorry but I think you missed the boat on this entirely.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

They can't hear your call . . .

... for public policies that will, in some incremental way, change your activities.  The roar of the jet is simply too loud.

Humans and certain other advanced primates use and are constantly alert for the use of deception. It's a hard-coded survival skill; children and other infant primates learn it early.

A key signal for deception being practiced against you is that the person/creature who wishes to deceive you has actions that don't align with their stated (indicated) intentions.  

When this is the case, the primate brain has a very hard time hearing the words, because the limbic system is interpreting the mismatch as stemming from a threat.  (Being deceived means being vulnerable, either to lost opportunity or to worse.)

So if you truly want to advocate for those policies, you best advocate for them by adopting them.  That allows for the creation of trust--that what you say is what you mean, and that you don't intend them harm.

But whispering the old prayer of the man who finds himself in a bar enjoying the attentions of the beautiful maiden ("Lord, make me pure -- but not yet.") is just wasting your breath.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

What politicians hear

Did you ever see the old Far Side cartoons about what dogs and cats hear?

The dog one shows a guy playing with a dog and saying all the usual endearments ("Aren't you a pretty dog!  Good Ginger!  Yes, Ginger is a pretty, pretty dog!") and, in the second panel, it's "blahblahblah GINGER! blahblahblah GINGER!"

The cat one shows a similar setup, only the second panel, where he shows you what the cat hears out of all that noise we make, it's only "blahblahblah."

When you write:

I take your point, but I think you (and many other people) make far too much of it.

I advocate for public policy that encourages efficiency and conservation precisely because I know that the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities.

So while I think people ought to do what they can in their personal lives, there is actually no hypocrisy at all in failing to do so while still advocating for public policies that push things in that direction.

What the politicians hear loud and clear is "the vast majority of people (including, often, myself) will not voluntarily curtail their own activities."  The politicians supply the " . . . and will vote against anyone who tries to make them" and, presto!  Here we are.  

Every airline trip is DEMAND for air travel, an industry that sits at the absolute pinnacle of a mountain of energy intensity and waste while providing an almost-entirely non-essential luxury to a tiny class of privileged elites who consider consumption of this product essential to their social status and who do so in droves, regardless of the cost it imposes on others.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Radicalized Cruzbike

Pangolin, I put together a cruzbike, front-wheel drive recumbent, with the Free Radical attachment from Xtracycle and it rocks -- I went to the store and loaded up a great volume of groceries and got several approving comments from people watching.

Then, the other morning, I strapped a suitcase, computer briefcase, and a sportsbag to it and rode to work so I could carpool along to an out-of-town trip -- the folks at work had thought I was kidding about riding my bike to where I would meet them.

Next I'm going to look into disk brake kits; the finale will eventually be an electric-assist kit a la Biod ...  

I expect I'll be riding my Radicalized Cruzbike long after I've persuaded my wife that we don't need to own a car.  

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

How about 350/5?

We can get to 350 in time, without chaos, if we start NOW, with everyone at every level in the North (individually, organizationally, municipally, nationally) cutting emissions 5% a year.

It's doable and necessary, and provides the missing step in an end-state goal like 350 ...

Telling people "Lose 50 pounds" is worthless.  Helping them lose a pound a week for fifty weeks can happen.
Same principle at work.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

John Engler

Take the charm and warmth of Dick Cheney, the intelligence of George Bush, the judgment of Don Rumsfeld, and the integrity and shape of Karl Rove -- mix well, and presto!  John Engler emerges!

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Tainter

I just started Joseph Tainter's book, "The Collapse of Complex Societies," where collapse is defined as a reduction in an established level of complexity.  I think that we may well be heading that way.

http://www.powells.com/biblio?PID=26593&cgi=product&a ...

Paul Krugman's blog at NYT website today has a post on peak oil going straight from ridicule to conventional wisdom (without the DFHs who talked about it ever getting any credit either way ... kinda like Iraq, only those who were disastrously wrong about the invasion are worth listening to ...)

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Confronting Consumption

I'm reading "Confronting Consumption" (MIT Press) just as I stumble on this ...  has a whole chapter on "commodification" -- turning everything into a product that can be packaged and sold as a "lifestyle" choice or a "personal sustainability practice."  I keep turning down corners of the book for a review I planned for Gristmill -- will have to read faster now!

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

KC Cole

For a great "physics for poets" explanation of how the universe works, see "Sympathetic Vibrations" by LA Times science writer KC Cole.  She's very good.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Take the Streets!

I agree with a comment posted somewhere (can't remember where) that PRT and all other solutions that force pedestrians to abandon the streets are failures.  Pedestrians and non-motorized users are not the problem on the streets, so why should they be denied the use of them?  People in motorized wheelchairs aren't able to enjoy the streetscape, to smell a flower, to chat on a bench, to stop and have a coffee or play a game of chess -- so why deny those pleasures to people on foot?

Because that is what WILL happen if PRT schemes get going -- the thinking will be that pedestrians are intruders and there is no longer any reason to provide any public space for people.  People using the pods would be expected and then eventually forced to use specific staircases closest to their destination, and then have to run for their lives at street level, which has been given over to the motorized hordes.

Screw that.  People own the streets.  Cars are the guests.  We should make them behave, not let them take over.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Worse than I thought

Mr. Greene -- though he shares the name of a great Revolutionary War hero from Vermont -- is no heir to that patriot tradition: he wants to bankrupt America and promote climate chaos all over the globe.  

Proof:  in the very next post to the one at issue here, he is discussing a new venture by an oil company to try and work around the failings of water-absorbing alcohol fuels.  He writes this astounding statement:

"Second, we need to resist any calls to hold off on developing ethanol infrastructure while oil companies and startups work on these new molecules. The threat of having to invest in this infrastructure is one of main reasons that most oil companies will consider real investments in the biofuels sector.

This is after admitting in his bio that

I have just enough science, engineering, and economics to be dangerous and use this training to translate the cutting edge energy technology developments into policy recommendations.

I really can't add to that.  I think he has described himself perfectly, and the only question is why people don't recognize that NRDC (like the Institute for Local Self-Reliance before it) has sold out to the agrofuels lobby.  

That "Switchboard" shows that we really need to understand what NRDC has become. How about

NRDC

= Not really defending conservation
= Naturally Republican, donning cover
= Natives restless, devour capital
= Never rest, defend carburbia!

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

"Synfuels" made that way for decades!

Synfuels = coal sprayed with a tiny amount of diesel oil.  Has enjoyed a special tax credit since the 70s.  As Lilly Tomlin says, cynics just can't keep up.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Not quite

As a tax? Notwithstanding my prior post, this approach isn't even as good as spot, since it is a price set from a regulator on high, stipulating a fixed price with no market correction to capture the vagaries of supply and demand.

OK, so don't pick a set price per ton -- set an initial per ton tax at a plausible level and then modify monthly until the desired carbon emissions level is reached. Requires no brilliance from a "regulator on high," just a willingness to allow government the same flexibility that the markets like to insist that they offer.

If all the money is being used to reduce payroll taxes and insulate the poor from the regressive nature of the tax and to clean up pollution, people won't really care -- as carbon emissions go down and more carbon-free sources are funded, the bite on any person will go down.

What's always interesting is that, in attacking carbon taxes, cap-and-gamers always pretend that taxes are and must always be crude instruments that look clumsy next to cap-and-game schemes.  But it's purely a mental construct.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Why decomm?

Fair point if true, Ron, but why are wind turbines decommissioned?  Given that high class wind sites don't move, aren't most turbines repowered when the first-generation turbine wears out?

How many wind-turbine sites are actually fully decommissioned rather than repowered?  (I'm genuinely asking, I have no idea -- I've actually not heard of an aging industrial size wind installation not being reused with a next-generation turbine.)

Obviously if the initial install was in a stupid location (Altamonte Pass, etc.) I could see not reusing that site -- and leaving the concrete base in the ground is probably the cleanest thing to do with it, yes?  Would take a buttload of energy to get them out of there for sure.  

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Woolsey's an ethanomaniac

Interesting choice to feature James Woolsey there -- I attended a day-long session he offered in Kalamazoo in 2006 called "PowerShift," a pretty slick presentation trying to alert people to our energy vulnerability around oil supplies.  He promoted corn ethanol pretty hard, and waved his hands about the wondrous magic of switchgrass just around the corner.  The corn lobby was there in force, as well as a union-run research center big into promoting "flex fuel" vehicles etc.  About what you'd expect from Michigan in other words -- "there's no problem with cars once we find the magic replacement fuel!"

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

My wondertoy fantasy

Picasso, you've hit on a fantasy I've been toying with for some time, even sketching a bit and eying various buildings for sites -- a downspout microhydro generator system.

In rainy climes (Pacific NW), there is a LOT of water to handle at times.  I've been dreaming about ways to use that water by putting it through downspouts made of the extra wide drain pipes, with an "archimedes screw" type rotor installed along its length and driving a small generator, capturing some of the power as the water then channels into a cistern (tapped with electric pump driven in part by the stored energy from the original rainfall).

So far the problem I id -- in addition to the amount of energy required to make it all vs. what you might get back -- is the noise.  It would need some decent bearings, which would serve as sound conductors; worse, the shape is the same as a resonator in a big pipe organ ... ideal for sound transmission, in other words.  So there's several routes for a lot of noise ...

But fun to think about.  There's a kids' museum nearby ... maybe I'll go over and talk to them about playing with the idea.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Wow -- need coffee

Ouch -- I've got it's and its wrong twice in the previous comment. My apologies, there's no edit function for comments that I can see.

Save your community: Cut greenhouse gas emissions 5% per year.

Re-correction

Jay, his #1 point is dead accurate, regardless of the device.  When you say "FutureGen efficiencies were equal or higher than most present coal plants, even with sequestration." you are not responding to the point actually made -- which is that, no matter the efficiency of the system, CCS is costing you something -- it reduces the plant's net output (compared to the same power island operating without CCS).

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

The way it works

racc asks if driving is really worth it?  Well, the answer is in the observation that there are a lot of people willing to spend $10 of other peoples' money to put $1 in their own pockets.  So, when you look at the way the costs and benefits fall on entirely different groups, you can see how some people would say yes, driving is worth it.

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You Tube it

While giving a speech working up to the endorsement Richardson mentioned that Obama would work on renewable energy and be a leader in dealing with climate change.  

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Hardly

Unless you think "capture" could be used to describe the relationship between "Kristin" and Eliot Spitzer, you can hardly call the relationship of DOT and the highway lobby an instance of "capture."

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Ummm, not candidate yet

Novick is the man, and will make an awesome US Senator.  Novick encouraged two Oregon congressmen to make a run for the Senate (Peter DiFazio and Earl Blumenauer), and only entered the race -- as the sole Dem ready to challenge the entrenched Gordon Smith when neither of those more well-known guys would run.

But he's not a candidate yet -- months after Novick got in, Chuck Schumer of NY recruited a colorless guy to run against Novick.  This latecomer, who had to be coaxed into the race, is named Jeff Merkley and polls show he has less name recognition -- even as the current Speaker of the House in the Oregon Legislature -- than Novick does.    Schumer gave Merkley $100,000 for the primary, a blatant attempt to make Oregon's choice for it, and one he is likely to regret.  

As one woman in the Oregon Ed Assn. said when talking about Merkley's blahness, "If you put all the white Democratic politicians in the country into a blender you'd wind up with Jeff Merkley."

Novick (novickforsenate.com) has an amazing personal story and cajones way out of proportion to his 4'9" stature.  His two TV ads to date have been hilarious (they're on his website).

If you want a whip smart and absolutely fearless Democratic US Senator from Oregon to join Ron Wyden, consider making a donation to Steve Novick from wherever you are.  Then he'll be a candidate, and, yes, he gets it on the environment.

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The food stamp experiment

One of the popular stunts lately has been for politicians to live on food stamps for a week (i.e., only consume the amount of food that they could purchase with food stamps for the week).  It's an enlightening exercise.

So I think that's what we need to get real biking amenities, biod.  We need politicians to forswear their cars for a month and have to live on shank's mare, biking, and public transit.  Not a problem in many major cities, but a nightmare in many state capitals (where the state transportation bureaus and planners are) and in virtually all suburbs.  Do it during the school year so that their children suffer the imprisonment that carburbia creates -- a teen's inability to get anywhere without a chauffeur.  

It's interesting to note that the Dutch are now the tallest people in the world, a status long held by Americans -- it's a good overall indicator of total population wellness, and it's sensitive to nutrition and population fitness.  We have, by putting ourselves in motorized wheelchairs so much, created a self-fulfilling prophecy -- and presto! suddenly we have lots of old people who can't move much because of a lifetime of sitting, either at work or in their cars.

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Visibility and bents

I strongly disagree that recumbents (bents) are less visible than uprights (wedgies).  The two instances in which I have been hit by cars were both when I was on an upright, including one where the driver glanced in my direction and then went back to looking left but decided to proceed anyway -- she said she never saw me, and I never saw her face clearly enough to know before she was on top of me.

When I ride one of my bents, the more natural and comfortable position of my head means I absolutely know whether I've been seen or not, because on a bent you ride through the world with your head in it's best visibility position (eyes front, not pointing down).

Also, there's the weirdness factor -- bents are still exotic bikes in most places, so they tend to be more apparent to most drivers.  Even more important, when viewed from the front (the most narrow visual angle for the driver) a bent rider's face draws the driver's attention in a way that a torso does not ... humans are programmed from birth to pay attention to faces.  Riding a bent means that my face is forward and my head is either at eye level or below eye level for drivers, which makes my face much more visible to them (compared to an upright bike, where the drivers often have to look up to see the rider's head, and then they're only seeing the top of a helmet, which isn't as visually arresting).  And, of course, from any other angle, a bent is far more visible than an upright -- most bents are longer than wedgies, and the weirdness factor makes them stand out.

In addition, I have a compressed air horn on my bents -- my better visual angle makes it possible for me to know if I've been seen.  When I see a driver at a stop light/sign, their face usually registers clearly that they've seen me.  If I don't see that acknowledgement in their face, I give a short toot as I approach the intersection to make them look.  If they don't look at me (typically because they are looking the other way, trying to find a spot to enter traffic), I won't cross their path.  Car drivers are morons and both my collisions have involved people in that situation -- simply too important to take another half second to notice a bike proceeding down a bike lane.

Finally, this bike ought to have a flag -- I won't ride any bike in the city without one.  They won't prevent all moron car drivers from failing to see you, but they help.  

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The replacement is peak oil aware

I've read at energybulletin.net that the replacement is peak oil aware, meaning he sees better with no eyes than most economists with two.

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You're not suggesting

an "unhealthy" focus on our corporate "partners" are you?

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Media complicity

I just watched an AMAZING one-hour talk by historian Naomi Orestes on the American Denialism.  Unbelievably good.

Not only does she do a terrific job recapping the science of climate change  (with its much older roots than most people realize) but she also firmly locates the denialist position in the outcrop of the other great scientific fantasy of our time, the "Star Wars" missile defense boondoggle.  

It goes fast, and you will be grateful for her careful, well-organized explanation of a crucial topic.  If you have teens, make them watch it with you.  Send it to everyone you know.

This is a fascinating, sobering talk, showing (among other things) just how the press failed to understand or to detect that even people with PhDs could intentionally attack science for political purposes and what that failure has cost us.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2T4UF_Rmlio

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Rising to the Bait

The culture war cuts both ways. Certainly some (although not all or even most) environmentalists indulge an unhealthy tendency to view corporations as the cause of all environmental problems, rather than as partners in the solution. Everyone claims that climate change isn't a left-right issue, but the rhetoric can be unintentionally revealing. At least once a week I read that oil companies and utilities "caused global warming," a formulation that neatly absolves you, me, and the rest of the planet of any responsibility for our energy use.

Certainly people who use the focus on corporations to avoid dealing with their own stuff (the many so-called environmentalists who enjoy jet travel while bashing oil companies, for example) need to do a serious reality check, but suggesting that corporations should be viewed as "partners in the solution" to our environmental crisis is just the rankest, most content-free PR sludge I've heard in a long time.

Corporations are like the spells in Disney's Sorcerer's Apprentice, far too powerful to be controlled by little Mickey once unleashed.  

They can be (and many are) filled with good people who, personally, don't want to destroy the world -- but who, day in and day out, do exactly that.

The corporate form -- private profits with limited liability ...  private profits without private accountability in other words ... create a dynamic where people follow orders and the net result is that the forests are felled, the fisheries are denuded of life, the mountaintops are leveled, and the atmosphere is rigged to blow like a TNT-wrapped package in a cartoon.

And, yes, that's because of our "partners" the corporations, whom the Supreme Court has elevated into superhuman status, with far greater constitutional rights than mere flesh and blood mortals; thus your constitutional rights are disappearing daily while corporations are winning limits on all responsibility and even from punitive damages (when not getting themselves exempted from ALL liability entirely, as the medical device lobby just managed).  We now live in a country where we still execute people for crimes committed as children but we limit Exxon's punitive damages because an award equal to three weeks of their profits for negligent hiring and supervision of a drunken oil tanker captain piloting one of the largest vessels in the world in shallow waters is a violation of the corporations "due process" rights.

And when some trusting nuns or other pollyannas buy into the propaganda about shareholder influence and "corporate responsibility," and buy some stock and to the stockholder meetings and attempt to raise environmental issues, they are shut down faster than a whorehouse that failed to pay the police chief that month.

Show me a single case where individuals -- people acting as people or as part of non-incorporated partnerships -- have committed a single environmental crime that would even rank in the Top 1000th most serious.  

You can't --- because it's in the nature of the beast that people who join corporations (totalitarian hierarchies where they have no rights) must necessarily stop applying their common sense and decency and stop acting out of concern for their home places and for people; rather, all the great environmental crimes are committed by corporations because, get this, it's CHEAPER.  For every whistleblower, there are a bunch of good little soldiers who do what they're told and keep their mouths shut -- and thanks again to your corporate partners on the Supreme Court, even government employees in corrupted public agencies have no right to job protections if they warn the public about the problems--thus, only those who are ok with losing their livelihoods dare speak out (see Garcetti v. Bd. of Supervisors).  Corporate employees have essentially no rights at all in our "partnerships."

Corporations are like chain-saws -- very efficient tools for special purposes ... but they sure as hell aren't "people" or "partners."

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Michigan

For some reason, a post I submitted on just this point has disappeared into the ether.  

Short summary (I didn't save the original text):  Michigan was doing some "21st Century Energy Plan[ning]."  The original projection was that demand growth was going to be like 2.1% a year; a reevaluation occurred as Michigan entered the recession ahead of the rest of the country (thanks to Crock of Shit Lutz and Co., among other things) and they pushed the projection down to 1.1% demand growth a year.  Good news, but still enough for Detroit Edison and Consumers Power to start beating the drums for some more big coal burners.

The big story was that the new head of the public service commission is willing to revisit the projections again already -- meaning that the state's energy plan for the "21st Century" survived something less than 16 months.

This is all a big deal, not just because Michigan (a state blessed with tremendous wind resource off Lake Michigan and in spots on the other side) is struggling with the end of an era, but also because avoiding foolish projections is the sine qua non of surviving the kinds of perverse incentives that Sean writes about here.  

Utilities make money by adding big chunks to their rate base, period.  That means that, like the real estate agents who insist that "now's the time to buy a home" under any and all circumstances, utility executives are forever realizing that we absolutely have to start the next big power plant project right now or else the sky will fall.

If the projections stand, the plants wind up getting built, simple as that.  If you want to stop the next round of the coal rush, you have to attack the projections that say those plants are needed.  The utility regulators in most states are not in the business of thinking that demand is something that they can control -- instead, the makers of huge energy-hogging plasma TV sets are determining demand.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Oh, and don't forget the obvious

Corporate-owned media is not in the business of running too many stories along the lines of "The following heavy advertisers are helping destroy the world your children will inherit:  GM, Ford, Toyota, .... all airlines, all overseas tourism promoters, and the entire real estate lobby from top to bottom."

The list could (and in reality does) go on and on.  But how long does the NY Times go on if those huge real estate, auto, and airline/tourism ads dry up?

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Thanks

Thanks for the shout-out there, Erik.  Since you were so kind, I thought I'd help complete the scene for the techno porn fantasy:

But filling one of these new Golfs with locally produced, organic, fair-trade biodiesel made from waste vegetable oil by a worker-owned biorefinery will certainly help.</biorefinery>

Insert after produced and before organic

"by tall, tanned vegan biochem majors working in tight organic cotton t-shirts made nearly transparent from the honest labor that causes the tiny downy hairs nearest their mocha-color flesh to glisten in the warm spring day, punctuated only by the almost inaudible whirr of the windmill smoothly slicing through the fresh air scented with daphne that reminds them of the smell of the line-dried organic bamboo sheets on which they laid down with their lovers the night before, when they whispered of their shared passion for"

 

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

On Volkswagen's new entry to the clean diesel fleet posted 1 year, 8 months ago 11 Responses

What we should be noting about Obama

THINGS YOU MAY NOT KNOW ABOUT OBAMA

CLASS ACTION REFORM: In 2005, Obama joined Republicans in passing a law dubiously called the Class Action Fairness Act that would shut down state courts as a venue to hear many class action lawsuits. Long a desired objective of large corporations and President George Bush, Obama in effect voted to deny redress in many of the courts where these kinds of cases have the best chance of surviving corporate legal challenges. Instead, it forces them into the backlogged Republican-judge dominated federal courts. By contrast, Senators Clinton, Edwards and Kerry joined 23 others to vote against CAFA, noting the "reform" was a thinly-veiled "special interest extravaganza" that favored banking, creditors and other corporate interests. . .

CREDIT CARD INTEREST RATES: Obama has a way of ducking hard votes or explaining away his bad votes by trying to blame poorly-written statutes. Case in point: an amendment he voted on as part of a recent bankruptcy bill before the US Senate would have capped credit card interest rates at 30 percent. Inexplicably, Obama voted against it, although it would have been the beginning of setting these predatory lending rates under federal control. Even Senator Hillary Clinton supported it. Now Obama explains his vote by saying the amendment was poorly written or set the ceiling too high. His explanation isn't credible as Obama offered no lower number as an alternative, and didn't put forward his own amendment clarifying whatever language he found objectionable.

LIMITING NON-ECONOMIC DAMAGES: These seemingly unusual votes wherein Obama aligns himself with Republican Party interests aren't new. While in the Illinois Senate, Obama voted to limit the recovery that victims of medical malpractice could obtain through the courts. Capping non-economic damages in medical malpractice cases means a victim cannot fully recover for pain and suffering or for punitive damages. Moreover, it ignored that courts were already empowered to adjust awards when appropriate, and that the Illinois Supreme Court had previously ruled such limits on tort reform violated the state constitution. . .

MINING LAW OF 1872: In November 2007, Obama came out against a bill that would have reformed the notorious Mining Law of 1872. The current statute, signed into law by Ulysses Grant, allows mining companies to pay a nominal fee, as little as $2.50 an acre, to mine for hardrock minerals like gold, silver, and copper without paying royalties. . . The Hardrock Mining and Reclamation Act of 2007 would have finally overhauled the law and allowed American taxpayers to reap part of the royalties. . . Later it came to light that one of Obama's key advisors in Nevada is a Nevada-based lobbyist in the employ of various mining companies

ENERGY POLICY: On energy policy, it turns out Obama is a big supporter of corn-based ethanol which is well known for being an energy-intensive crop to grow. It is estimated that seven barrels of oil are required to produce eight barrels of corn ethanol, according to research by the Cato Institute. Ethanol's impact on climate change is nominal and isn't "green" according to Alisa Gravitz, Co-op America executive director. "It simply isn't a major improvement over gasoline when it comes to reducing our greenhouse gas emissions." . . . Obama voted in favor of $8 billion worth of corn subsidies in 2006 alone, when most of that money should have been committed to alternative energy sources such as solar, tidal and wind.

SINGLE-PAYER HEALTH CARE: Obama opposed single-payer bill HR676, sponsored by Congressmen Dennis Kucinich and John Conyers in 2006, although at least 75 members of Congress supported it. . . Obama's own plan has been widely criticized for leaving health care industry administrative costs in place and for allowing millions of people to remain uninsured. "Sicko" filmmaker Michael Moore ridiculed it saying, "Obama wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan-the same companies who have created the mess in the first place."

NORTH AMERICAN FREE TRADE AGREEMENT: Regarding the North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama recently boasted, "I don't think NAFTA has been good for Americans, and I never have." Yet, Calvin Woodward reviewed Obama's record on NAFTA in a February 26, 2008 Associated Press article and found that comment to be misleading: "In his 2004 Senate campaign, Obama said the US should pursue more deals such as NAFTA, and argued more broadly that his opponent's call for tariffs would spark a trade war. AP reported then that the Illinois senator had spoken of enormous benefits having accrued to his state from NAFTA, while adding that he also called for more aggressive trade protections for US workers.". . . Obama cast the deciding vote against an amendment to a September 2005 Commerce Appropriations Bill, proposed by North Dakota Senator Byron Dorgan, that would have prohibited US trade negotiators from weakening US laws that provide safeguards from unfair foreign trade practices

SOME FINAL EXAMPLES: On March 2, 2007 Obama gave a speech at AIPAC, America's pro-Israeli government lobby, wherein he disavowed his previous support for the plight of the Palestinians. . .

He wouldn't have his picture taken with San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom when visiting San Francisco for a fundraiser in his honor because Obama was scared voters might think he supports gay marriage . . .

Obama acknowledges the disproportionate impact the death penalty has on blacks, but still supports it, while other politicians are fighting to stop it. . .

Obama aggressively opposed initiating impeachment proceedings against the president and he wouldn't even support Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold's effort to censure the Bush administration for illegally wiretapping American citizens in violation of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. . .

[Matt Gonzales is running with Ralph Nader as an independent vice presidential candidate. From an article in Counterpunch]

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Pringle Creek

I have looked at Pringle Creek closely, including a visit during an "open house" promotion where the one completed home was available for inspection.  

It's quite sad, because, as others have already noted, they have made some seriously bad decisions that mean it will always be the hybrid super-SUV trophy wife of faux green developments -- way overpriced and way too consumptive of energy and materials, appealing mainly to the ego.

On the "near transit" thing, if you investigate the Salem transit system website, it shows that there is no service on Sundays and very long headways the other days.  Oh -- and you are not allowed to build without a driveway or garage ... gotta design a "sustainable" development around the auto!  

Bottom line is that the project was spec'd during the peak of the housing bubble, and its economics are likely way upside down except for people moving to Salem from collapsing markets elsewhere (CA).  The other large development that was to be put on the site, which is not financially connected to Pringle Creek, has already suffered a developer bankruptcy and so is in limbo.

The Pringle Creek developers appear to have made no attempt to get the kinds of variances needed to actually build something like a sustainable new construction project.  Instead, they simply built the greenest possible thing that challenged none of the deeply un-green paradigms.

It also had the bad luck to arrive right as the real estate meltdown did.  Thus, the project will probably always serve the sprawl lobby as an (unfair) example of what happens if you even mildly deviate from the McMansion development model.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.

Terms

names definitely matter.  As Bill S. said, "The name's the thing."  If the name sounds vaguely friendly, it's hard to put a realistic image to it.

I've been giving presentations lately where I have had good results with the terms "climate crisis," "global heating," and "climate destabilization."  Crisis gets at the politics, heating is what is driving the destabilization, and that's what drives the negative consequences.

Save the world: Reduce greenhouse gas emissions 5% annually.