No one has given our (still) President Bush a lot of credit for taking positive steps to help solve the climate crisis.
But in a master stroke, he has taken the first step, and like many others, it’s a bold, decisive one. As with most of his policies, it has been misunderstood. (more…)
My nephew, Andrew, has been in Togo with the Peace Corps for more than a year, with another left. He is providing not just his work and labor, but is now helping a group of farmers learn about self-financed sustainable farming practices. If they are successful, it may be a model for the whole village of 200 people.
And perhaps other villages.
Andrew reports having plowed fields with oxen, planted crops, and trees.
But what I find most interesting is not that his actions may help for the coming crop harvest, but his perspective on how to get things done.
He writes:
What is really exciting to me is that now I have a year left to make some serious impact. I have the respect of the community and the Togolese people in general. I am no longer the “white guy”
It is with his year of service that he earned that respect, and from which he is able to have a serious impact. It may have helped that Andrew is an exceptional young man, with strength of will, passion, and a strong sense of duty.
But there’s no doubt that a lot of sweat and deprivation were involved.
I am also struck by the parallels to this letter from my nephew in the Peace Corps one might find in a letter home from one of our country’s soldiers.
Each may have a serious impact, each has stepped beyond their own self-interest to do something important, faces danger, and which takes great effort and deprivation. Each has thrust themselves into a completely foreign environment and culture. And each has done this voluntarily. It’s also true that neither has any guarantee of success. I have nothing but respect for them. (more…)
Delightful. Frightful.
* I promise that this will be my last political post for a while unless something really, really un-delightful and frightful happens, begins to happen. Or for any other currently undisclosed reasons that I am the decider-of that I can earmark at my executive discretion by making a signing statement.
So Paul Graham and his Y Combinator venture firm have done it again: a new site called CO2stats has a clever way for any website to offset the carbon emissions associated with electricity needed to make the Internet magic happen.
And trust me, it ain’t magic. There’s a lot of electricity going into making that magic. And all that electricity creates a lot of greenhouse gases.
According to the CO2stats site:
The carbon footprint of air and automobile transportation is widely known, but few people are aware that the electricity generation required for information and communication techologies (ICT) is now responsible for 2% of global CO2 emissions, exceeding the emissions of the entire aviation industry.
(emphasis mine). (more…)
On Sunday an article by Roger Lowenstein, a former reporter for the Wall Street Journal, appeared in the New York Times titled “What’s Really Wrong with the Price of Oil?” It’s pretty long, and thorough. He dispassionately describes the various forces affecting the price of oil, especially its price over the last year or so, in economic terms.
He’s pretty economically conservative, in my estimation, which is why I was surprised to see the following:
The way to avoid a repeat is to dust off an idea that Gerald Ford once proposed: a tax on oil. Ideally, it would kick in only if the price fell back to, say, $70 a barrel. The beauty of this tax is that, very likely, no one would have to pay it. The tax would merely serve as a floor — a new lower bound.
What? A tax on oil? Wouldn’t that make it even more expensive?
Then today, the Times has an article reporting on OPEC’s response to the slumping price of oil (which is nearly the same price as it was last year at this time). And then, an article on how alternative energy is going to have a hard time competing against these low energy prices.
All of these are related.
(more…)
As the US Presidential election draws near, I have renewed hope that we’ll finally get serious about energy independence. In a moment of (uncharacteristic) optimism, I also think it may be the case that the financial crisis will provide the opportunity for us to take exactly the right kind of actions to address energy independence and a host of other issues.
(Of course, it could go the other way)
As I have argued before, energy, global warming, the economy, consumption, conservation, and even the Iraq war, obesity, disease, global food, and water issues are not separate. In so many ways, these issues are all linked. (more…)
(Note: this post has nothing whatsoever to do with energy or conservation: it’s a political rant)
Fox News.com reports that McCain spokesman, Tucker Bounds responded to an Obama ad.
“We’re going to talk in truthful terms, which they are not in that advertisement,” Bounds said. “We also want to talk in truthful terms about who Barack Obama is. These are important things for voters to know.”
Just curious, is “truthful terms” anything like talking truthfully? Or perhaps even telling the truth? Or does it just means that the terms (i.e. sound bites) will be truthful, but strung together in such a way as to be effective … which is to say, deceptive.
(more…)
I Mean it in the Best Possible Way
But I suppose that one man’s pork is another man’s passion, to paraphrase most terribly. And in the case of this bill, tax credits for renewable energy were … renewed. And unlike several other add-on’s, this one makes sense, in context. (more…)
In watchin’ the VP Debate last night I now understand Sarah’s and John’s position on energy independence. See, I’ve been havin’ some problems understandin’ how these guys can be for it when all they’re saying is “Drill, Baby, Drill”.
The thing is, and I would like to shout out directly to Sarah here (can I call you Sarah?). You see, Sarah, energy is not exactly the same thing as oil, gas, and coal. Now I know you’re sittin’ right on top of a whole heap of oil and gas there in Alaska, and it seems like a gosh-awful lot of it that we can tap into, and for sure, almost everything we use to power our country with now comes from one of those taps. Yep, there’s some nu-cu-ler in there, too and a little other crazy stuff.
But Sarah, lemme tell it to you straight. A billion or trillion of barrels sure seems like a big ol’ number, but the thing about it is, though we do have a bunch of billions of barrels of oil that we could tap into, those billion taps would only make only one of New Jersey, North Carolina, or Georgia energy independent. (more…)
A walking school bus is a simple idea. One or two parents sign up to be drivers, routes and times are set, and every day, our kids walk along to school.
An industrious parent in my daughter’s elementary school organized ours. She found leaders and started four routes last week; I have been “driving” one. We have about 10 kids in our route, and I think the others do as well.
Of course all I care about is that it’s “green” :-) But there’s so much more.
It’s convenient for parents — they just drop their child at a stop at the appointed time and say goodbye.
It’s fun for the kids. Friends who didn’t know they lived close to each other have met. Several kids who were a little uncertain at first are having a blast.
It’s painless for the driver. (more…)
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