The (de)merits of the Agricultural Committees

Ezra Klein has a smart post on Ag-Committees and why they’re overkill. I don’t know a whole lot about these committees, but I’m pretty convinced the subsidees we’ve been sending to Big Corn and Co. are a bad thing for our economy, public health and energy policy. This will be an interesting conversation to follow, to say the least.

Texas is the “10 billion hampsters in 10 billion running wheels” of wind power

…doesn’t quite have the right ring to it, eh? Green Inc. is looking for a new metaphor.

ReTweet: “Broken America”

An exercise in cynicism by Sullivan and one of his readers:

A reader writes:

Sorry, but I don’t understand why anyone would be excited about the Waxman bill. I imagine it’s well-intentioned. But this is a country that can’t even raise the gas tax from 18.4 cents to 30 cents. This is a country with a Nobel laureate who heads the Energy Department, who announces that global warming could be reduced by simply painting more roofs (and other surfaces) white, and of course we all know that we’ll never actually do this. This is a country with terribly unbalanced finances, and we all know that of course no one will raise the retirement age for social security, not even by 6 months, to take effect next year. This is a country that, fully-aware that there is a glut of cars in the world, subsidizes… GM and Chrysler. So why on earth would anyone think that this country can do anything to affect global warming?

Apologies for the cynicism, but when there are so many “softball solutions” that seem to have no prospect of actually happening, it’s hard to care about an ambitious bill about climate change.

I have to say I agree. I know the system mitigates against swift change – and that’s its beauty – but it also seems to be resistant to any change that might benefit the public interest if it can be prevented by massively powerful private interests or ideological campaigns based in cynicism and the pursuit of power.

Watching how this government can do nothing to reform health care, nothing to end the wars and occupations that drain the coffers, nothing to tackle entitlements even as the country teeters toward complete insolvency, nothing to reform a broken immigration system … even after a president is elected with a clear mandate and a Congressional majority in both Houses: well, we know why America is fucked, don’t we?

I gotta say that I’m too young to be this cynical… but theirs is an informed cynicism based on a history of failures. But what it doesn’t take into account is America’s history of successes in certain areas as well.

There’s a certain amount of cynicism that is healthy. And I think on the whole, Andrew is pretty positive and hopeful (“Know Hope” is a common meme in his writing). So taking this post out of context from his daily barrage of posts is a little unfair.

But, if you haven’t, take a look at this short TED talk about perspectives on time. I think it lays out a healthy time perspective that we should try to hold even in the context of a government that often fails more than it succeeds.

Sully, this one goes out to you:

The latest on climate change

Al Gore does his Al Gore thing at TED:

And then there was Bolivia

A 21st century international powerhouse-to-be:

Photographer/tumblogger Clayton Cubitt says, “Bolivia is the Saudi Arabia of lithium, the metal needed for the batteries that will power our electric car future. I saw this ITN report on News Hour the other night, and was stunned by the visuals and the story.”

(Danke: Sullivan)

The right kind of stimulus? Redux

Will Wilkerson asks some tough questions regarding the Obama stimulus plan:

I agree that human capital and physical infrastructure are crucial to growth. I’m even happy to agree that government investment in education has more than paid for itself over the years in added growth. But I also think the evidence points to the idea that returns to public investment in the status quo system of education have diminished to basically nothing. No Democrat is going to do anything to run afoul of their party’s most powerful client in order to promote the deep structural changes needed in primary education to actually improve the quantity and quality of American human capital. So instead we get free money for college, which is Obama’s way of saying “thank you” to the loyal, powerful bloc of Democrats who make their living pouring valuable human capital into nineteen-year-olds by making them pretend to have read Plato and Beloved.

As for energy infrastructure, we really could use a “smart grid” that allowed for real-time pricing of energy based on demand. (See Lynne Kiesling on the “transactive” potential of the smart grid.) Markets are known to be the best mechanism available for efficiently allocating resources, and putting in place an infrastructure for pricing energy would be good for growth and the environment. [...]

One thing policy can do is to make markets possible, so that there are rewards to ingenuity. That can mean making an illegal market legal, or making a legal market worth investing in by lowering the burden of regulation. Another thing it can do is to restructure intellectual property law to encourage rather than discourage invention. Another thing it can do is not crowd out private investment in innovation, which is the opposite of what Obama plans to do in education, energy, and health care.

Makes you think.

Like the spokes of a wheel

That’s how a city would look for Christopher Leinberger. The spokes would be transportation/commercial corridors, the wedges would be filled with mixed income housing that is all within walkable distance of those corridors. The center of the wheel: downtown.

The result would be a highly efficient system of mini-suburbs with everyone able to walk and/or take public transit to the places they need to reach.

Very cool.

Feeding 9 billion people

It’s going to take many fish and many loaves:

This is the central argument of The Feeding of the Nine Billion, a new report on food prices and scarcity issues published by Chatham House.

The report argues that long term demand drivers – a population set to reach over 9 billion by mid-century, and the rising affluence and expectations of a growing ‘global middle class’ – are half the story: the World Bank forecasts 50% higher demand for food by 2030.

At the same time, scarcity issues will present increasing challenges on the supply side.  Oil prices are set to resume their climb after the downturn, given that investment in new production has collapsed as oil prices have fallen, setting the stage for a future supply crunch.

Food prices are likely to follow them, as biofuels, fertiliser prices and transport costs play their part.  Climate change, water scarcity and competition for land will all also push prices upwards over the longer term.

Four point plan:

First, we need to get a 21st century Green Revolution underway, and fast. [...]

Second, we need to scale up social protection systems in developing countries. [...]

Third, there is much to do in the trade context. [...]

Finally, there remains the observation that (as Gandhi once put it) there’s enough for everyone’s need, but not for everyone’s greed.

Interesting article… I suspect the solutions will come in forms that we, as of yet, have not imagined. Ingenuity and creative solutions will arise to solve the challenges of the future, as they have  repeatedly in the past.

An alternative

There is now a low-energy alternative to drying machines… you know… not counting just hanging clothes on a clothes line.

Last Wednesday, DryerMiser received approval from Underwriters Laboratories, the independent product safety certification organization, and major appliance manufacturers have expressed interest in developing hydronic dryers using the new technology, according to H.T.C.’s president Michael Brown.

Before that, H.T.C. hopes to soon begin mass production on a $300 fluid-heating conversion kit that will allow technicians to turn existing gas and electric dryers in hydronic dryers in under an hour.

This is an exciting step. While clothes lines are a low-cost and low-tech solution to the high energy demands of a drying machine, their undeniable convenience has made them the standard. Peoples habits have moved past clothes lines, so we might as well fix the standard rather than trying to get people to move backwards.

Obama address

Tennessee ash sludge flood, continued

Oh Boy. “Unlined coal ash waste ponds pose a cancer risk 900 times above what the government considers ‘acceptable.’” Tracking back through the developments here.

Another reason ethanol is not the solution

Millions of dollars per year are lost because crops aren’t diversified in corn-country.

“Corn is a less favorable habitat for many ladybird beetles (ladybugs) and other beneficial insects that feed on pests such as the soybean aphid,” said Doug Landis, MSU professor of entomology. “As we plant more corn, we reduce the ability of that landscape to supply beneficial predators to control pests in soybeans and other crops. This results in increased pesticide use and yield losses. This research estimates the value of this biological pest control service in soybeans (in the four states) to be about $240 million each year.”

Yglesias makes a great point

He says we need a carbon tax for all the usual reasons, but… Why should we disproportionally tax gasoline over other forms of carbon-based energy?

Tennessee ash sludge flood, continued

It’s bigger than first described. THREE TIMES bigger.

Tennessee ash sludge flood

This is just another on a long list of reasons to develop renewable energies. Disastrous. And not at all surprising.

We’ll get there… but we need to get there quicker.

UPDATE: NTY article