avari | haroon moghul

Tom Friedman Really Rips Republicans

I don’t know how much steel is in Obama’s belly, but I do know that the issues he is focusing on in this campaign — improving education and health care, dealing with the deficit and forging a real energy policy based on building a whole new energy infrastructure — are the only way we can put steel back into America’s spine. McCain, alas, has abandoned those issues for the culture-war strategy.

Who cares how much steel John McCain has in his gut when the steel that today holds up our bridges, railroads, nuclear reactors and other infrastructure is rusting? McCain talks about how he would build dozens of nuclear power plants. Oh, really? They go for $10 billion a pop. Where is the money going to come from? From lowering taxes? From banning abortions? From borrowing more from China? From having Sarah Palin “reform” Washington — as if she has any more clue how to do that than the first 100 names in the D.C. phonebook?

[link]

When Obama Loses

What should we do?  We should first off remember that he would not have lost in 16 years hence; the fear of the decline of a certain way of life, its marginalization -- even though in the majority -- is painfully obvious to the G.O.P. base.  They are fighting ultimately futile attempts to change the course of America from what it is and is becoming (more global), and if Obama loses, keep in mind that almost half the country will have thrown its support behind him, a sign of where the country is going.  Not yet, but almost.  So we should have hope if the unthinkable is realized, because the unthinkable is still possible.  The unthinkable, blind, timid, absent an articulated future.

Too many Americans still want to live on a frontier; a significant minority are afraid of minorities, and afraid of the challenges posed to a way of life by a variety of circumstances, all of which do not demand self-congratulatory fear-mongering, but rather sacrifice, discipline and flexibility; to accept that the world is not going to remain the footstool for American consumerism realized, retained or continually shaped through military might and threats of still more, but that our habits have to be changed, or at least the mechanisms by which we get to our habits -- our priorities and the ways in which we articulate and propose them.  Hard work and vision, not rhetoric and bombs.  So if not this time, next time.  But next time still has a damn good chance of being this time.  I still believe most Americans are fed up with Bush and McSame if not McWorse, and see in Palin a prettier, less experienced, equally hard-headed version of our current President.

I still believe we'll see Barack Obama on January 20, 2009, where he should be.

Texas Blows

"Texas regulators have approved a $4.93 billion wind-power transmission project, providing a major lift to the development of wind energy in the state.

The project will ease a bottleneck that has become a major obstacle to development of the wind-rich Texas Panhandle and other areas suitable for wind generation.

Texas is already the largest producer of wind power, with 5,300 installed megawatts — more than double the installed capacity of California, the next closest state. And Texas is fast expanding its capacity.

“This project will almost put Texas ahead of Germany in installed wind,” said Greg Wortham, executive director of the West Texas Wind Energy Consortium." [via NYT]

Being Thomas Friedman and Being Right

Every once in a while, he makes a strong point; his most recent NYT column is a good case in point: "We have no energy strategy. If you are going to use tax policy to shape energy strategy then you want to raise taxes on the things you want to discourage — gasoline consumption and gas-guzzling cars — and you want to lower taxes on the things you want to encourage — new, renewable energy technologies. We are doing just the opposite." [Link]

With gas prices going up, shouldn't we be pushing for new investments and new penalties for egregious wastes of energy? Better to hurt a little now than a lot later. But McCain and Clinton offer us, as their insightful, presidential solution, tax rebates, which as a strategy obviously solves nothing, offers meagre financial relief and takes even more money away from long-term solutions while we continue to mire ourselves more deeply in long-term problems.

Is it not strange that we, as such an otherwise resourceful country, are so incapable of producing leadership that can see around a corner, that can fathom that spending what you don't have, over and over, to the tune of huge debts and eventual defaults (to economic competitors no less), is ... a bad idea? Certainly the insights a Messiah would be made of.

why michael bloomberg is one of the few brilliant american politicians (plus cheap flights to europe)

Because he understands the looming environmental challenge, with foresight and realism -- in a way that few Americans, politically, financially, or culturally, are capable of expressing.  That we live in debt, on debt, and beyond our means, and this includes our ecological norms.  But Bloomberg challenges that, as with cabs, so with Town Cars.  (Is it not embarrassingly odd that the American car industry, facing a big U.S. recession, overwhelmingly continues to produce muscle cars instead of hybrids?)

On another note, travel to Europe, come Mar 30, is about to get much cheaper.  Good thing our dollar's collapsed just in time!

So far, though, most United States airlines are simply looking to open service to Heathrow — a strategic hub that offers connecting flights not just across Europe, but to the Middle East, Africa and Asia, too. Flights from the United States to Heathrow are expected to increase 31 percent, to 2,932 flights in July from 2,233 this month, according to OAG Back Aviation Solutions.

Northwest plans to add daily service later this year to Heathrow from Detroit, Minneapolis and Seattle. Beginning on March 29, the New York area will get four new flights a day to Heathrow: two from Continental out of Newark and two from Delta out of Kennedy Airport. Travelers in Atlanta will have a new direct flight to Heathrow aboard Delta  (as opposed to connecting through Chicago or some other city), as will travelers out of Dallas-Forth Worth and Raleigh-Durham — both aboard American by March 30. [NYT]

are cars the problem? (no, suburbs...)

Below, by Alex Steffen, on WorldChanging:

Sprawled-out land uses generate enormous amounts of automotive greenhouse gasses. A recent major study, Growing Cooler, makes the point clearly: if 60 percent of new developments were even modestly more compact, we'd emit 85 million fewer metric tons of tailpipe CO2 each year by 2030 -- as much as would be saved by raising the national mileage standards to 32 mpg.

In other words, there is a direct relationship between the kinds of places we live, the transportation choices we have, and how much we drive. The best car-related innovation we have is not to improve the car, but eliminate the need to drive it everywhere we go.

Read the original essay. It's certainly worth your time; locating the problem not in cars (alone), but why we need cars so often.

stupid, stupid, stupid

It is certainly a mark of American social, cultural and economic decline that we can no longer understand global problems within the framework of global solutions.  Or perhaps this has been a consistent feature of American nationalism, which has only now become harmful because of changed economic and social circumstances around the world; we are no longer the dominant economic force globally without rival, yet we often act in ways that assume our singular importance for the world.  One example of this is the issue of global warming and future environmental changes.

I don't understand all the rage over biofuels; a recent study has concluded that biofuels are significantly more harmful to the environment than normal fossil fuels because of the associated costs involved in producing biofuels.  Not only do they drive up the prices of basic commodities, which especially hurts poor people (but nobody really cares), they also transfer valuable existing scrubland or forest or rainforest to biofuel crop cultivation. 

This means, the study has concluded, biofuel cultivation releases 93 times more carbon than would be released if we relied on fossil fuels in the context of conversion of land for crop cultivation.  In other words, biofuels may be incredibly dangerous, and it is only the manifest stupidity of the Republican Party and the global warming skeptics faction which turns any issue over global environmental concern into one of jingoistic American nationalism.  It is not the case that the whole world faces a challenge from pollution, but that's the real problem is an America that supposedly lives on foreign oil.  Is that really the pressing problem?

To me, the most common sense solution would be to emphasize hybrid vehicles and fuel efficiency.  And to penalize people who make stupid decisions.  Let's be honest: the decision to purchase a Hummer affects all of us.  It should be penalized by taxes or by other penalties.  Especially in the context of congested cities and polluted environments, the government should act to penalize people who unnecessarily purchase large and wasteful vehicles, build excessively large homes, and contribute otherwise harmfully to our common and global situation. 

By penalizing people and simultaneously encouraging more efficient technology, we can make a huge difference -- instead of turning to new and untested technologies, especially considering that the current state of economic and scientific analysis is often incredibly compartmentalized and generally fails, in the short run, to consider the wider impacts of changes we make to our economy and to our environment. 

The European Union and a number of European countries have recently tried to address the land use issue with proposals stipulating that imported biofuels cannot come from land that was previously rain forest.

But even with such restrictions in place, Dr. Searchinger’s study shows, the purchase of biofuels in Europe and the United States leads indirectly to the destruction of natural habitats far afield.

For instance, if vegetable oil prices go up globally, as they have because of increased demand for biofuel crops, more new land is inevitably cleared as farmers in developing countries try to get in on the profits. So crops from old plantations go to Europe for biofuels, while new fields are cleared to feed people at home.

Likewise, Dr. Fargione said that the dedication of so much cropland in the United States to growing corn for bioethanol had caused indirect land use changes far away. Previously, Midwestern farmers had alternated corn with soy in their fields, one year to the next. Now many grow only corn, meaning that soy has to be grown elsewhere.

Let's also consider how incredibly innovative industries can be when given the right motivation: there's no reason we can't simultaneously punish people for buying vehicles that harm the world, and also encouraging people to buy vehicles and to develop vehicles that are far more responsible.  The American ideal of go it alone has seen its time pass. 

It is a mark of the current administration's backwardness that it continues to emphasize an attitude which has only manifestly encouraged American decline.  Isn't that the definition of insanity?  Doing the same thing over and over again, and expecting the result to be different?

fear of a green america

A new international ranking of environmental performance puts the United States at the bottom of the Group of 8  industrialized nations and 39th among the 149 countries on the list. 

European nations dominate the top places in the ranking, which evaluates sanitation, greenhouse gas emissions, agricultural policies, air pollution and 20 other measures to formulate an overall score, with 100 the best possible.

The top 10 countries, with scores of 87 or better, were led by Switzerland, Sweden, Norway and Finland. The others at the top were Austria, France, Latvia, Costa Rica, Colombia and New Zealand, the leader in the 2006 version of the analysis, which is conducted by researchers at Yale and Columbia Universities.

“We are putting more weight on climate change,” said Daniel Esty, the report’s lead author, who is the director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy. “Switzerland is the most greenhouse gas efficient economy in the developed world,” he said, in part because of its use of hydroelectric power and its transportation system, which relies more on trains than individual cars or trucks.

The United States, with a score of 81.0, he noted, “is slipping down,” both because of low scores on three different analyses of greenhouse gas emissions and a pervasive problem with smog. The country’s performance on a new indicator that measures regional smog, he said, “is at the bottom of the world right now.”

He added, “The U.S. continues to have a bottom-tier performance in greenhouse gas emissions.”

...

India, China and Australia ranked among the bottom 25 nations in the indicator that combined all the climate change scores; China and Australia ranked below the United States. As with earlier versions of the index, the authors created separate lists of countries that are considered peers, either economically or geographically, and scored the performance of nations in those subgroups.

New Zealand and Japan led the Asian-Pacific nations, with performance scores of 88.9 and 84.5. Croatia (84.6) and Albania (84.0) led the list of Eastern European and Central Asian countries, which takes in most of the former sphere of influence of the Soviet Union, not including the Baltic nations. Mauritius (78.1), whose per capita domestic product outstrips those in the other countries of sub-Saharan Africa, led this group, just above Gabon (77.3).

Costa Rica (90.5), Colombia (88.3) and Canada (86.6) led the 26 countries of the Americas; Haiti (60.7) was last in this group.

Belgium (78.4) continued to rank near the bottom of the 28 European nations.

“Belgium remains a shock,” said Professor Esty, who said the heavily industrialized country, riven by centuries-old ethnic quarrels, was 57th among the 149 nations. “Of those ahead of them, only 10 are richer,” he added.

 

[via NYT]

don't eat tuna sushi unless you want to taste like expensive mercury

I haven't ever really been a great fan of seafood, but especially since we have been warned to stay away from excessive consumption of seafood -- due to high levels of mercury, which in turn are due to the overwhelming and disgusting pollution of our oceans.  Now we find out that, in Manhattan at least, one should stay away from tuna sushi; the New York Times reports:

Recent laboratory tests found so much mercury in tuna sushi from 20 Manhattan stores and restaurants that at most of them, a regular diet of six pieces a week would exceed the levels considered acceptable by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Sushi from 5 of the 20 places had mercury levels so high that the Food and Drug Administration could take legal action to remove the fish from the market. The sushi was bought by The New York Times in October.

The Times goes on to recommend that one should not eat from such restaurants more than once every several weeks.  And considering the toxic effects of mercury, and its esspecial and tremendous dangerousness for pregnant women, I would say that the oceans are becoming off-limits:

In 2004 the Food and Drug Administration joined with the Environmental Protection Agency to warn women who might become pregnant and children to limit their consumption of certain varieties of canned tuna because the mercury it contained might damage the developing nervous system. Fresh tuna was not included in the advisory. Most of the tuna sushi in the Times samples contained far more mercury than is typically found in canned tuna.

Over the past several years, studies have suggested that mercury may also cause health problems for adults, including an increased risk of cardiovascular disease and neurological symptoms.

Dr. P. Michael Bolger, a toxicologist who is head of the chemical hazard assessment team at the Food and Drug Administration, did not comment on the findings in the Times sample but said the agency was reviewing its seafood mercury warnings. Because it has been four years since the advisory was issued, Dr. Bolger said, “we have had a study under way to take a fresh look at it.”

No government agency regularly tests seafood for mercury.

Sometimes I feel as if we are in a Qur'anic story from way back when, when a Prophet has been sent to warn his people of great danger, but the majority of people are simply indifferent, and much of that because of the timidity of their leaders and the laziness of their lifestyles. 

One is reminded of the Native American saying that one should consider the effects of an action upon the next seven generations, and consider that we rarely discuss the effects of our actions beyond a few years.  From wars to financial practices to the size of our cars.

China and Progress

What the Industrial Revolution looked like: Is China "choking" on growth? That's rush-hour in Beijing. The NYT has a 10-part series on the consequences of China's 30-year period of growth, the fastest sustained economic growth of any large country. Ever. Jumping from where Europe's northwest, and America, were in the early 1800's to the modern-day, with the benefit of knowing what kind of growth is bad and why and how. Seems like knowledge, itself, is no guarantee against the repetition of error.