Stratospheric proposal

James Pethokoukis, writing at the Capital Commerce column at U.S. News & World Report, has a July 18, 2008, column under the headline, Dissecting Al Gore's $5 Trillion Energy Plan, which begins:

In a speech yesterday here in Washington, Al Gore challenged the United States to "produce every kilowatt of electricity through wind, sun, and other Earth-friendly energy sources within 10 years. This goal is achievable, affordable, and transformative." (Well, the goal is at least one of those things.) Gore compared the zero-carbon effort to the Apollo program. And the comparison would be economically apt if, rather than putting a man on the moon—which costs about $100 billion in today's dollars—President Kennedy's goal had been to build a massive lunar colony, complete with a casino where the Rat Pack could perform.

Read the rest.

hat tip: Russell Roberts, who notes: "...Pethokoukis gives Al Gore the benefit of the doubt and assumes that the costs are linear. I don't think they would be..."

Low carbon footprint

Sometimes cartoons say things better than mere words. Like this.

hat tip: Carl, via Dr. Sanity

Rationing freedom

From Environmentalists Pick Up Where Communists Left Off, by Charles Krauthammer (Townhall.com, May 31, 2008):

Just Monday, a British parliamentary committee proposed that every citizen be required to carry a carbon card that must be presented, under penalty of law, when buying gasoline, taking an airplane or using electricity. The card contains your yearly carbon ration to be drawn down with every purchase, every trip, every swipe.

There's no greater social power than the power to ration. And, other than rationing food, there is no greater instrument of social control than rationing energy, the currency of just about everything one does and uses in an advanced society.

Planting delayed by cold weather

Dave Wilkins of Capital Press reports that Idaho crops are behind schedule, in large part because April's temperatures were well below normal (averaging 4 degrees below normal in the Boise area, for instance).

Melanie Phillips on recent UK elections (and a green skeptic mayor)

Melanie Phillips is not happy with government in the UK. (You may file that under "Understatement".) But she does let us know that the electorate in London has pulled off a bit of a revolt. From Brown crumbles; but do the Tories get it? (Daily Mail, 5 May 2008):

Not surprisingly, the Tories are ecstatic at the local election results. And they are to be congratulated on running a smooth, disciplined and shrewdly judged campaign, not least in London where their strategy of getting out the anti-Ken vote paid dividends in the election of Boris Johnson as Mayor.

But there is a distinct risk that the Conservatives will misinterpret their great victory. Already, there are claims that it has vindicated the Cameroons’ strategy of tacking to fashionable Left-wing thinking in order to head off any charge that they are just the ’same old Tories’.

This is to misunderstand what happened in London. For Boris’s appeal was not as a representative of the new look, politically correct Conservative party. On the contrary — his appeal was to be the gloriously politically incorrect, anti-politics candidate. As one voter told canvassers: ‘I’m not voting for you Tories; I’m voting for Boris instead.’

It is the very things that get Boris into such trouble — his shambolic manner, his inability to be diplomatic, his grandstanding instinct to do anything to get a laugh — that make people adore him. Even though party minders zipped up his mouth during the campaign, his appeal is that of someone who will never be corralled by any political machine.

And Boris was running against the quintessential machine politician.

Ironically, Ken’s original appeal eight years ago lay in his image as the Labour anti-Labour candidate. A vote for him was a kick in the teeth for the out-of-touch political elite. But then Ken himself turned into a key member of that elite — and what a distasteful, corrupt and arrogant spectacle it was.

A vote for anti-politician Boris therefore does not necessarily mean a vote for the Tories. Boris himself grasped this immediately when, in his acceptance speech, he said people shouldn’t think for a minute that London was now a Tory city.

For those of you tired of global warming hysteria, take heart. From later in the same article:

The triumphant Cameroons are in danger of missing the point that what happened last week was a mighty vote against Labour rather than an endorsement of the Conservatives. Indeed, such an endorsement would make little sense since, among the issues that most cheese off the electorate, there’s precious little to choose between the parties.

There’s no more delicious example of this than global warming. For the Cameroons, green policies are their totemic proof that the party has moved with the times. But Boris is actually a green sceptic who has called environmentalism a religious phenomenon and mocked green policies as ‘pagan yammering for sacrifice’.

And on this, he is far more in tune with the public who, sceptical of global warming hysteria, are deeply unimpressed by the prospect of green taxes. Indeed, Mr Brown is reported to be about to ditch the proposed rise in fuel duty in a panicky attempt to assuage public fury. So where does that leave the Cameroon carbon crusaders?

Read the whole article here.

Green before green was hip (and lost its bearings)

Sheila Wray Gregoire writes about living 'green' without being a green fanatic. If only the fanatics would listen, I think a lot of people could be spared a whole lot of grief, up to and including needless starvation.

hat tip: SFO Mom

Poem for today

Snow in the City

by Rachel Field

Snow is out of fashion,

But it still comes down,

To whiten all the buildings

In our town;

To dull the noise of traffic;

To dim each glaring light

With star-shaped feathers

Of frosty white.

And not the tallest building

Halfway up the sky;

Or all the trains and busses,

And taxis scudding by;

And not a million people,

Not one of them at all,

Can do a thing about the snow

But let it fall

From The Family Treasury of Children's Stories: Familiar Favorites, compiled by Pauline Rush Evans, published by Doubleday and Company for Keepworthy Books, a division of The Parent's Institute, Inc., New York, as part of the Classics to Grow On series. Copyright 1956 by Nelson Doubleday, Inc. Acknowledgment: Branches Green by Rachel Field, c. 1934, The Macmillan Company. (I presume I'm linking to information on the right Rachel Field. Correct me if I'm wrong. And, by the way, a quick check shows that Branches Green is another of those books you probably don't want to sell at a yard sale for fifty cents, considering that current prices start at ten bucks, and quickly jump from there to $30, $40, $50 and up.)

Technical note: Someday I'm going to figure out how to do indents around here. I typed this poem with indents on every other line, starting with the second line, but the indents went away...

I doubt we'll get enough snow to cover the ground, but it is snowing. Again. The forecast is for springlike weather come the weekend, but for now the main indication that we're not still in winter is that sunrise and sunset aren't right for winter. Thank goodness for that, by the way. I'm as ready for long days as I am ready for warm ones.

January sure has been long this year...

It is snowing. Again. Winter put in a stirring performance this year around here, and it seems intent on making curtain calls. In a man-made and man-run theater, we'd have audience members bailing out the exits by now, and stagehands hauling out the hooks to drag the spotlight-drunk star off the stage. But since we don't run the show, and since I can't afford a trip to, say, Hawaii, I'm settling in to enjoy the snow. I might as well, I guess. Two to four inches is predicted during this encore. I might have to dig the snow shovel back out from the shed. A few weeks ago I naively thought we were done with this sort of thing for the year, and happily packed the shovel away.

We have, by the way, a baseball tournament in progress down the street. Baseball, if you haven't noticed, is not an indoor sport. Teams have come from all around the state just to play a summer game, and are, off and on at least, playing it in swirling snowflakes. Such a deal. It will make for good stories when they're middle-aged, if nothing else, I guess. "When I was your age, son, I played baseball in the snow. And we won. So stop your bellyaching... What's the younger generation coming to, anyway?"

It was just our luck that a cold winter coincided with a spike in heating oil prices. Is spike the right word? It doesn't seem strong enough, somehow... Anyway...

I grew up in a social niche where 72 degrees was room temperature. I think somebody in government recommended it as a good temperature, and somehow it came to be the most common temperature, and from there it became the expected temperature, and from there it became the temperature at which all self-respecting people (at least all the self-respecting people we knew) kept their houses year-round. I remember, as a kid, that amongst our friends were people who would lower their thermostats during the winter, but didn't want anyone to know about it. There were also people who closed off part of their house during the winter to save on heating costs, but likewise didn't want anyone to know. Common sense, apparently, was out of fashion.

I don't know what we were thinking. I can't remember the last time I had the thermostat at 72, nor the last time I didn't close off rooms I wasn't using. It's no hardship, and it saves enough money to make a difference. You wear a few more clothes in the winter? So what? You have to get acclimated to a lower temperature every fall? So what? As for the closing off of rooms, it makes it all the sweeter when spring comes around, and you can stretch out again.

Of course, I'm blessed with a cheerful temperament, and I enjoy outsmarting circumstances, and frugality is one of my favorite sports. Some people, I notice, are happier pretending to be put upon. I don't get it, but there it is.

A few months back, an acquaintance at church was telling me about where she lived, in a tumble down part of town. She was saying that the house she rented was really pretty comfortable, despite what people thought about houses along that street. She was also gushing with nice things to say about her landlord. I've had that landlord as a landlord in days past, and he really is a nice man, and johnny-on-spot when it comes to reported problems. If you'll work with him, he'll work with you, and he goes out of his way to keep rents down.

So, the other day, I had occasion to look up the acquaintance, and found that she was days away from moving to an apartment elsewhere in town. Now that she'd decided to move, she had not one good thing to say about the place she was leaving, but chief among her complaints was that she'd had to spend $900 on heating oil so far this winter. She was pointing out the cracks along the doors, and bemoaning the lack of insulation. She also tried to light into listing little things she thought the landlord should have done for her, but didn't. That wasn't flying well since we both know the man, so she shifted back to being really upset about the heating bill. "This place just sucks oil," she said.

Well, I've lived in places like that. I currently live in a place built back before much (if any) insulation in the walls or ceiling was considered necessary, and before windows were insulated, and there are cracks around our windows and doors, too. We put tape here, and foam there, and plastic sheets up, and it helps, but it's still a bit tricky to keep it heated, especially if you're trying to stretch your dollars. So I started in with pleasant commiseration (what are friends for?), and was starting to tell her about how we just bundle up a bit and turn the thermostat down, etc., and how it helped us a lot. I'm not sure what I expected, but I got a startled stare from her.

And then it sunk through my thick skull that while I was warmly dressed in a sweater, she was in a short sleeve shirt. Her oil stove was in the same room as us. Set at 72. I guess she never got the updated memo...

I didn't know quite what to say. From what I could pick up, she'd spent the winter being frantic about her heating bills, and yet she hadn't done the most basic adapting to reduce the bill.

She's on welfare. We're not. I wonder if that makes a difference, or if she's simply a few decades behind me, and thinks it's shameful to not have a room temperature of 72. Or what?

Oh, well. She considers me a self-respecting and respectable person. I can only hope that I helped her feel OK with the idea of turning down the heat.

Before you laugh too hard, or tut tut too much, I'm nearly willing to bet you've got some counterproductive social standard hanging around in your life, messing up your goal to be a sensible person. After I read this post a week or so ago (specifically, the last part of it), my husband and I have been cheerfully recounting all sorts of things we used to hold as important, or necessary, that we don't consider "imperatives" anymore.

For instance, my mother's rule was that when you took clothes off in the evening, they went into the clothes hamper. It makes no sense to me to wash clothes every time you wear them, if they aren't dirty. It's more work, it uses more water, it uses more electricity, it uses more detergent, and it's harder on the clothes. But, I kid you not, it was a struggle to overcome the idea that I was doing something wrong by quite sensibly wearing a dress or shirt or slacks or skirt more than once without laundering.

And what was that nonsense we had back in the day that if two girls showed up to the same event wearing the same dress or outfit, that we were expected to run crying from the room? Or that we had to have a new dress for every "event"? I can't make sense of either "imperative," but I recall feeling something akin to horror if someone's clothes were too much like mine, or if I couldn't get a new dress for a dance or other special occasion. If I remember correctly, it was generally considered less humiliating to stay home than show up in a dress you'd worn before.

Excuse me? Where in the world did that come from? And why didn't the grown-ups sit us down and chew us out for behaving deplorably?

Oh, wait. We learned it, for the most part, from our mothers...

So where did they learn it from? And why? I've long since tossed those attitudes overboard as rules not worth keeping, by the way. (A lot of the rules we learned in the '60s and '70s, are, to my mind, not worth keeping, but that's another story.)

Anyway, I'll bet you've suffered a few such glitches in common sense at one time or another in your life just because 'everyone else is doing it'. Yes? C'mon. What are some silly rules you used to follow that you've opted to not 'honor' anymore?

Welcome to the era of sailing ships

Sort of.

Side note: I think the currently-fashionable panic about CO2 is offbase, and based more on vogue than science. But I do like the projected savings in operating expenses. And I like that this new technology saves fuel. (When the wind cooperates, of course.)

hat tip: Expat Yank

The science behind global warmism

I was following a link from this post at Joust the Facts, and was reading The Science of Gore's Nobel by Holman W. Jenkins Jr. of The Wall Street Journal's editorial board (OpinionJournal.com, December 5, 2007), when my husband (off on an errand) called to say that that it's brittle outside, and that's it's expected to sink to single digits or lower tonight. This in one of the banana belts of this part of the world...

So, now that I'm through chuckling (it was great timing, and a nice contrast), I think I'd better share with you what Mr. Jenkins points out as the science behind Gore's crusade (it's not what Mr. Gore would like you to think):

The media will be tempted to blur the fact that his medal, which Mr. Gore will collect on Monday in Oslo, isn't for "science." In fact, a Nobel has never been awarded for the science of global warming. Even Svante Arrhenius, who first described the "greenhouse" effect, won his for something else in 1903. Yet now one has been awarded for promoting belief in manmade global warming as a crisis.

How this honor has befallen the former Veep could perhaps be explained by another Nobel, awarded in 2002 to Daniel Kahneman for work he and the late Amos Tversky did on "availability bias," roughly the human propensity to judge the validity of a proposition by how easily it comes to mind.

Their insight has been fruitful and multiplied: "Availability cascade" has been coined for the way a proposition can become irresistible simply by the media repeating it; "informational cascade" for the tendency to replace our beliefs with the crowd's beliefs; and "reputational cascade" for the rational incentive to do so.

Mr. Gore clearly understands the game he's playing, judging by his resort to such nondispositive arguments as: "The people who dispute the international consensus on global warming are in the same category now with the people who think the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona."

[...snip...]

Public opinion cascades are powerful but also fragile--liable to be overturned in an instant when new information comes along. The current age of global warming politics will certainly end with a whimper once a few consecutive years of cooling are recorded. Why should we expect such cooling? Because the forces that caused warming and cooling in the past, before the advent of industrial civilization, are still at work.

No, this wouldn't prove or disprove a human role in warming, only that climate is variable and subject to complicated influences. But it would also eliminate the large incentive for politicians to traffic in doom-laden predictions--because such predictions would no longer command media assent and would cease to function as levers to redistribute resources.

Read the whole thing

I think we all need to sometimes step back and ask if what we're championing is based on nothing more than a cascade that took on a life of its own, apart from the facts. I know I've had a few jolts in my life when I realized to my horror or dismay that I'd been working off of faulty info or misguided opinion. (I've been obliged to disown some of what I spouted when I was feminist, for instance... Ahem...)

VOA News Video of the Day: Eco-tourists jetting to Greenland in large numbers

I haven't figured out how to provide a permanent link to a specific video at Voice of America's website, but today's Video of the Day is about how the folks of Greenland are cashing in on eco-tourists who want to see a glacier 'before it's too late.'

If mention was made of the Gilbertian nature of global warming scaremongering of the mankind-is-killing-the-planet-by-carbon-dioxide-production variety prompting the addition of jet routes direct to Greenland from various points around the world, somehow I missed it.

See the VOA News - Video of the Day Archive for the video, as well as others from the last week. (It's a pretty varied offering: the demise of Coney Island as an amusement park, Appalachia's unique music, a website that posts personal secrets sent in by postcard, a former Minuteman missile site in South Dakota that is now open as a national park, one with the teaser "World Population Day reveals more than half the world lives in urban areas – often poor – and that women are key to societies’ welfare" for which the headline reads: "6.6 Billion and Growing," and, from last Tuesday, one titled "A Chilling Climate for Press Freedom" which is teased with "Since 2000, 13 Russian journalists have been mysteriously murdered. What’s it like to be so dedicated to your job in spite of death threats?")

Getting back to the topic of today's video, for their own sakes I just hope the Greenlanders are working on a Plan B for when the current hysteria dies down and/or 'global warming' gives way to the next round of "global cooling" fears. ("The climate" is always in flux. If you want to be scared by a lack of stability, you'll always have your chance, it appears to me...)

You don't think the hysteria will die down? Perhaps you're right. There are a lot of people who seem to be heavily invested in the global warming warning industry, including the folks who find it a very useful thing to use to promote the extension of government power, or a great excuse to sue somebody with a different outlook on life. (Sigh.)

On the other hand, I am seeing more articles like this one. Aren't you?

And more and more folks from 'developing' countries are managing to find an audience for their pleas for help getting out from under the hardships imposed on them by environmentalists. Live Earth Vs. Africa by Kofi Benti is a fairly good representation of what I'm talking about here.

And I like to think that the recently launched "I'm more worried about the intellectual climate" catchphrase might make a difference. It's from DemandDebate.com, which I found out about here. One of the biggest frustrations I have with many of the "global warming" partisans is that they act like science is a matter of setting up experiments -- or even just computer models, for goodness sake -- until you get the results you need to promote the goals you already have, and then declaring that the discussion is over. That is not science. Not by a long shot.

If it weren't so sad, and so harmful (and therefore, unfortunately, not all that funny at the end of the day), I'd probably laugh at the folks who point at scientists who don't march in lockstep with the "global warming consensus" crowd, scornfully calling them skeptics, as if skepticism were a bad thing for a scientist. Since when? Would we have had any advancement in science -- would we have "science" in the first place? -- would we have ever come to a better understanding of the physical world, if scientists hadn't ever wondered if somebody else's theory would hold up to another good, hard, carefully delineated look?

Hello, America. You've been mapped.

For better or worse, while we weren't looking the government has been compiling a database of... Oh, let them tell you: USGS Release: Land Cover Database Details State of the Land: Lower 48 described with Census-like accuracy (3/19/2007 3:01:46 PM):

The U.S. Geological Survey and the federal interagency Multi‑Resolution Land Characteristics Consortium (MRLC) recently announced the completion of a massive database that describes the land surface condition of each 30-meter cell of land in the conterminous United States. Nearly six such cells - each 98 feet long and wide - would fit on a football field. The 2001 National Land Cover Database (NLCD 2001) and its products are available at http://www.mrlc.gov/

Land cover is broadly defined as the biophysical pattern of natural vegetation, agriculture, and urban areas. It is shaped by both natural processes and human influences. NLCD 2001 data portrays 16 classes of land cover in the lower 48 states, the percent of tree canopy, and the degree of surface imperviousness in urban areas.

"Just as the U.S. Census is fundamental in assessing patterns of national population growth, we also require an authoritative, periodic review of land conditions ‑ a Census of the Nation's Land Resources ‑ to understand how people and the land interact," said USGS Director Mark Myers. "The National Land Cover Database gives us that. It's a versatile, balanced look at the state of the land."

Based on satellite imagery taken in 2001, the broad, yet precise database was constructed in a six‑year collaborative effort by the 11 MLRC agencies (http://www.mrlc.gov/). The range and accuracy of information in the database enables managers of public and private lands, urban planners, agricultural experts, and scientists with many different interests (for instance, climate change or invasive species) to identify critical characteristics of the land for a wide variety of investigations.

"With a growing population of more than 300 million people and the challenging prospect of climate change, comprehensive information about the condition of our land resources becomes more and more vital," said Barbara Ryan, USGS Associate Director for Geography. "Land cover information is essential for understanding a wide variety of issues: for example, ecosystem status and health; spatial patterns of biodiversity; land use planning; and land management policy."

NLCD 2001 is a second generation effort to update the Nation's land cover information. The first NLCD was completed in 2000 with imagery acquired around the year 1992. Information from NLCD 1992 has been used in thousands of applications in the private, public, and academic sectors ‑ applications that range from helping to site cell phone towers to tracking how diseases spread.

The national consistency of NLCD information makes possible the sweeping, contextual analysis of national land perspectives, such as the Heinz Center's State of the Nation's Ecosystems, the Environmental Protection Agency's Draft Report on the Environment, the USGS National Water Quality Assessment, and the Landfire Program (a federal interagency program to predict and mitigate wildfire). Complete, updated coverage of NLCD 2001 data for Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico is expected to be available by December 2007.

NLCD products are web enabled for download from the MRLC website at http://www.mrlc.gov/. USGS is currently working with private software developers to create publicly available, user friendly tools that can be used to conduct web-based geospatial analyses of NLCD. Future nationwide updates of NLCD 2001 will continue to monitor land cover change across the Nation.

I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news or something in between. Something about having my yard scrutinized and put into a database without my permission doesn't exactly thrill me. Nor does that "sweeping, contextual analysis of national land perspectives" idea. Or the "enables managers of public and private lands, urban planners, agricultural experts, and scientists with many different interests (for instance, climate change or invasive species) to identify critical characteristics of the land for a wide variety of investigations" business. And should I possibly have any concerns about mention of the Heinz Center? (Board of Trustees here.)

Well, the database is there. If it can be put to good uses, like improving wildfire programs, that's to the good. If it can be used to show how "climate change" tends to be worse in urban areas because of too much asphalt, I won't complain about that. (Side note: I understand that buildings with roof gardens are naturally much cooler in summer than those with a black tar roof. Which stands to reason. Not that I want roof gardens mandated - I don't - but if you've got a roof that lends itself to the addition of a garden, it's a thought. Plants can also help clean up pollution a wee bit and birds and insects find them useful, too. Such a deal. Just be sure to learn the ins and outs: too heavy a garden and you'll endanger the inhabitants, too light of planting containers and you'll be sending flying objects into pedestrians below on windy days, etc.)

But I have a funny feeling that the info will be misused as well, cherry-picked and diced and plugged into beta-version computer models by people with agendas that aren't necessarily friendly to private property rights or personal freedom.

I hope I'm wrong. But.

You might keep your eyes open. It will be interesting to see what various people/groups/agencies/activists/politicians/the press do with all this data. I don't intend to lose any sleep over it, but I am afraid it might get interesting once any well-positioned folks who confuse knowledge with wisdom get their teeth into it.

What was it President Reagan used to say? Trust, but verify? I like that idea in this case. I'm sure everyone involved with this project means well, but that's no guarantee they won't accidentally run people over while they have their eyes on the far horizon, so to speak.

Oh, and if I had a betting window it would be open right now: Will the press think this massive compiling of data about private property as well as public is good, or bad, or not worth mentioning?