Category: interesting

Yo, America. Once the largest freshwater body of water west of the Mississippi… let’s fix it.

The lake’s disappearance has had far-reaching consequences.

In 1852, Army engineer George Derby could stand in the Sierra’s foothills and count the eponymous bulrushes, called tules, near the lake’s shoreline. But on many midsummer days now, it’s hard to see across the street.

Sometimes it hurts to breathe.

Judith Lewis: The Ghost of Tulare :

Reviving an ancient lake may help solve California’s water woes.

“The real question is: How do we manage the water we have for farms, fish and people?”

In fact, given the unfortunate confluence of water and fiscal crises in the state, restoring Tulare Lake — or at least parts of it — appears more feasible than ever.

“It would move the San Joaquin Valley toward regional self-sufficiency,” he said.

George Bush’s sloppy ideology reaches the ridiculous.

Safe Drinking Water Act analyzed at NYTimes:

That law requires communities to deliver safe tap water to local residents.

But since 2004, the water provided to more than 49 million people has contained illegal concentrations of chemicals like arsenic or radioactive substances like uranium, as well as dangerous bacteria often found in sewage.

Regulators were informed of each of those violations as they occurred.

But regulatory records show that fewer than 6 percent of the water systems that broke the law were ever fined or punished by state or federal officials, including those at the Environmental Protection Agency, which has ultimate responsibility for enforcing standards.

Studies indicate that drinking water contaminants are linked to millions of instances of illness within the United States each year.

“Prediction is very difficult. Especially about the future.” – Yogi Berra

Carl Zimmer:

Coupled with a rapid increase in global temperatures, ocean acidification, and other changes, we may be pushing the environment into a state we’ve never experienced as a civilization.

Extra carbon dioxide is creating a second worldwide evolutionary pressure as it dissolves into the ocean. There it is turning into carbonic acid and lowering the pH.

Knoll points out some disturbing parallels between today’s crisis and a pulse of mass extinctions that occurred 252 million years ago, wiping out an estimated 96% of species in the oceans and 70% of species on land.

A rapid increase in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere led, among other things, to ocean acidification. For animals that depended on calcium carbonate, “you had about a 90% chance of going extinct,” says Knoll. “Corals, sponges, brachiopods, they all kicked the can.”

Knoll doesn’t expect human-driven mass extinctions to be as bad as that ancient one. But they could still be unimaginably huge. “If we lose half the species on the planet, our grandchildren are not going to see them restored,” says Knoll. “It will take millions of years.”

One way or another, life will survive this current crisis. But where is life headed in the very distant future?

Why? Maybe just a bit of petty cash.

When word broke that 62 MBs of emails were hacked from the Climate Research Unit, the sheer amount of content (not to mention handpicking of select passages that were most incriminating) seemed to suggest that the hacking was more than just some average Joe hellbent on disproving climate change.

Now, the story gets more complex: fingers are pointing at Russia’s secret service.

A senior member of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change says that Climategate was an advanced, politically motivated attack.

According to Daily Mail, the leaked emails were originally posted on a server at a firm called Tomcity, an internet security business Tomsk, Siberia. Russia’s track record does not bode well in the wake of these allegations. From Daily Mail:

“Computer hackers in Tomsk have been used in the past by the Russian secret service (FSB) to shut websites which promote views disliked by Moscow….Such arrangements provide the Russian government with plausible deniability while using so-called ‘hacker patriots’ to shut down websites.”

Shaun Walker from the Independent cited similar information:

“The FSB security services, descendants of the KGB, are believed to invest significant resources in hackers, and the Tomsk office has a record of issuing statements congratulating local students on hacks aimed at anti-Russian voices, deeming them “an expression of their position as citizens, and one worthy of respect”. The Kremlin has also been accused of running co-ordinated cyber attacks against websites in neighbouring countries such as Estonia, with which the Kremlin has frosty relations, although the allegations were never proved.”

If FSB is truly behind Climategate, the obvious question is, Why?

The prestigious journal Nature summarizes Climategate:

Stolen e-mails have revealed no scientific conspiracy, but do highlight ways in which climate researchers could be better supported in the face of public scrutiny.

If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.

Governments and institutions need to provide tangible assistance for researchers facing such a burden.

NYTimes:

New assessment of the $700 billion bailout program.

The Treasury Department expects to recover all but $42 billion of the $370 billion it has lent to ailing companies since the financial crisis began last year, with the portion lent to banks actually showing a slight profit, according to a new Treasury report.

Of course, the government’s potential losses extend beyond the Treasury program. The Federal Reserve, for example, still holds a trillion-dollar portfolio of mortgage-backed securities whose market value is unknown.

Tsunami on the sun? Well of course.

Towering waves rise quickly, a 100,000 kilometer-high tsunami sprinting across the surface of the sun at about 900,000 kilometers per hour, and spread out in a circular pattern millions of kilometers in circumference … a footprint of a coronal mass ejection.

Elizabeth May:

A Different Picture Emerges When You Read Them All

Strange, isn’t it that media are not wondering about who hacked into the computers and who paid them? Or why Dr. Andrew Weaver’s office in Victoria has been broken into twice. My guess is that all the computers of all the climate research centers of the world have been repeatedly attacked, but defenses held everywhere but East Anglia.

The scientists at East Anglia, plus colleagues around the world, are being hung out to dry as though they did something wrong.

I did not want to spring to their defense until I read all their emails. Yes, all 3,000 or whatever of them.

“Seven hundred billion was a number out of the air,” Neel Kashkari recalls, wheeling toward the hex nuts and the bolts. “It was a political calculus. I said, ‘We don’t know how much is enough. We need as much as we can get [from Congress]. What about a trillion?’ ‘No way,’ Hank shook his head. I said, ‘Okay, what about 700 billion?’ We didn’t know if it would work. We had to project confidence, hold up the world. We couldn’t admit how scared we were, or how uncertain.”

“Don’t try to score a touchdown. Just — if Paulson throws the ball, catch it.”

In February 2008, that meant drafting an emergency plan in the unlikely event of an economic meltdown. Kashkari and a colleague wrote, “Break the Glass: Bank Recapitalization Plan.”

When the banks actually tanked later that year, the 10-page plan laid the basis for TARP. Amid the chaos, Kashkari was appointed czar.

[ unlikely event? actually tanked? ]

Thoughts tended toward the apocalyptic.

Carbon dioxide indirectly causes up to 50% more global warming than originally thought…

“we do not want to be alarmist here”

But if people are thinking about stabilizing CO2 at a certain atmospheric level, or putting together a treaty, or having a debate about what the levels should be, it really is important to know what the long-term consequences of those emissions are going to be, because CO2 hangs around for so long.

!

Today 56 newspapers in 45 countries take the unprecedented step of speaking with one voice through a common editorial.

We do so because humanity faces a profound emergency.

The science is complex but the facts are clear.

Mridul Chadha:

But one does not need to believe in climate change to support the potential climate deal which is scheduled to replace the Kyoto Protocol after 2012. The climate deal means much more than just carbon cuts, carbon trading and adaptation fund. A scientifically sound climate deal would bring many other positive changes for the environment, economy and the society.

At many regions exposed to air by various activity, the land sinks because bacteria then eat the dirt.

New Orleans, for instance. Florida. California. Yes, Holland.

A very good article here on subsidence.

Robert Frank:

Few subjects rival the federal budget deficit in its power to provoke muddled thinking.

It’s a pity, because there are really only three basic truths that policy makers need to know about deficits:

1. It’s actually good to run them during deep economic downturns.
2. Whether deficits are bad in the long run depends on how borrowed money is spent.
3. Eliminating deficits entirely would not require any painful sacrifices.

To eliminate deficits, we need additional revenue.

The encouraging news is that we could raise more than enough by taxing activities that cause harm to others. Called Pigovian taxes [wiki] … such levies create a burden that is more than offset by the reductions they cause in costly side effects of everyday activities. …

1. When producers emit sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere,… the resulting acid rain harms others. As the … Clean Air Act demonstrated, the most efficient … remedy was to tax sulfur dioxide emissions. …
2. When the transactions of financial speculators fuel asset bubbles, they increase the risk of financial meltdowns. A small tax on those transactions would reduce this risk. …
3. Carbon dioxide emissions contribute to global warming. Here as well, taxation offers the most efficient and least intrusive remedy.

Anti-tax zealots denounce all taxation as … depriving citizens of their right to spend their hard-earned incomes as they see fit.

… nowhere does the Constitution … grant us the right to harm others with impunity.

No one is permitted to steal our cars or vandalize our homes. Why should opponents of taxation be allowed to harm us in less direct ways?

Found at Economist’s View

Wall Street Journal:

The EPA will declare carbon dioxide a ‘Public Danger‘.

Such an “endangerment” decision is necessary for the EPA to move ahead early next year with new emission standards for transportation and large emitters such as power stations, cement kilns, crude-oil refineries and chemical plants, triggering a carbon cut of 17% below 2005 by 2020.

More people have more money.

Global production of meat is currently around 260 million tons and will increase 21% by 2015. Two thirds of the growth is expected to be in China, according to market research bureau Gira. [news clip]

Big winners of the increased consumption are poultry and pork.

Poultry production will grow 25%, an additional 24 million tons by 2015 reaching a total of 105 million tons.

World population will eat 125 million tons of pork in 2015, over 21 million tons above 2005 (+10%).

Beef will increase 13% (8 million tons) to a total of 70 million tons in 2015.

Michael Pettis:

How fast does consumption need to grow in China in order for a meaningful rebalancing to take place? Probably a lot more than you think. This is arithmetically the case because China is starting from such a low base.

At roughly $1.2 trillion in 2008, total Chinese private consumption is only a little more than that of France (around $1.0 trillion) and still less than that of Germany (about $1.3 trillion, not to mention the UK’s $1.4 trillion and Japan’s $3.2 trillion). This fact alone should cause us to be extremely skeptical of feverish claims about the role Chinese consumers can play in making up for any contraction in US consumption – which at roughly $9.4 trillion last year is nearly eight times the size of China…

I think too many commentators underestimate the magnitude of the problem.

Yves Smith:

In a sense, this crisis is about values (the prices paid for many assets) and the rules (regulations governing financial markets). It is also about rules (rigid model based formulations of price) and values (ethics or the lack thereof).

Copenhagen’s agenda reduced to a nutshell: :

1. Targets, Timetables and Actions:
   2020 greenhouse gas reductions for developed countries at 25-40% cuts based on 1990 levels and 80% by 2050. Developing countries agree to reduce deforestation, limit emissions and select sustainable futures.
2. Funding Climate Action:
   A ‘climate finance mechanism’ with $10-$15 billion ‘fast start’ in 2010 to 2012 as well as longer term adaptation and mitigation – including forestry and technology support.
3. Common Standards:
   Common methods to track emissions, to account for, and report on emission reduction.
4. Peer Review:
   Countries to measure, report and verify.
5. Global Climate Agreement:
   Set up a legally binding 2012 agreement, built on these foundations.

That’s it.

And all of you are leaders in your communities — in the business sector and the labor sector, in academia, we even have a few pundits here — it is important to understand what’s at stake and that we can’t keep on playing games.

I mentioned that I was in Asia on this trip thinking about the economy, when I sat down for a round of interviews. Not one of them asked me about Asia. Not one of them asked me about the economy.

I was asked several times about had I read Sarah Palin’s book. (Laughter.) True. But it’s an indication of how our political debate doesn’t match up with what we need to do and where we need to go.

Obama at the Forum on Jobs and Economic Growth:

We have a structural deficit that is real and growing, apart from the financial crisis. We inherited it. We’re spending about 23 percent of GDP and we take in 18 percent of GDP and that gap is growing because health care costs, Medicare and Medicaid in particular, are growing. And we’ve got to do something about that.

You then layer on top of that the huge loss of tax revenue as a consequence of the financial crisis and the greater demands for unemployment insurance and so forth. That’s another layer. Probably the smallest layer is actually what we did in terms of the Recovery Act. I mean, I think there’s a misperception out there that somehow the Recovery Act caused these deficits.

No, I mean, we had — we’ve got a 9-point-something trillion- dollar deficit, maybe a trillion dollars of it can be attributed to both the Recovery Act as well as the cleanup work that we had to do in terms of the banks. In turns out actually TARP, as wildly unpopular as it has been, has been much cheaper than any of us anticipated.

So that’s not what’s contributing to the deficit. We’ve got a long- term structural deficit that is primarily being driven by health care costs, and our long-term entitlement programs. All right? So that’s the baseline.

Now, if we can’t grow our economy, then it is going to be that much harder for us to reduce the deficit. The single most important thing we could do right now for deficit reduction is to spark strong economic growth, which means that people who’ve got jobs are paying taxes and businesses that are making profits have taxes — are paying taxes. That’s the most important thing we can do.

We understand that in this administration. That’s not always the dialogue that’s going on out there in public and we’re going to have to do a better job of educating the public on that.

The last thing we would want to do in the midst of what is a weak recovery is us to essentially take more money out of the system either by raising taxes or by drastically slashing spending. And frankly, because state and local governments generally don’t have the capacity to engage in deficit spending, some of that obligation falls on the federal government.

Having said that, what is also true is that unless businesses and global capital markets have some sense that we’ve got a plan, medium and long term, to get the deficit down, it’s hard for us to be credible, and that also could be counterproductive. So we’ve got about as difficult a economic play as is possible, which is to press the accelerator in terms of job growth, but then know when to apply the brakes in the out-years and do that credibly. And you know, we are trying to strike that balance, but we’re going to need help from all of you who oftentimes are more credible than politicians in delivering that message.

Because we want to leverage whatever public dollars are spent, and we are under no illusion that somehow the federal government can spend its way out of this recession. But it is absolutely true that any of the ideas that have been — been mentioned here are still going to require some public dollars, and those are actually good investments to make right now.

Brad DeLong says, “It’s so nice to have an intelligent, thoughtful, and industrious president….”

Jeffrey Sachs:

We can only marvel at the disarray.

Here we are, 17 years after the signing of the UN framework convention on climate change, two years after the decision in Bali to agree a new climate policy, one year after Barack Obama’s election, and days out from the Copenhagen conference. Yet a real global strategy to avoid catastrophe remains elusive.

The truth is that even if we reach a political agreement, we’re not yet on track to achieve practical, significant and sustained progress.

Yes, there is some progress. … The mayhem, however, is at least as great.

Robin Wells:

Big savers got us into this mess, as well as big spenders.

The world is trapped in a global savings glut. It is both the source of our economic woes and an obstacle to the task of pulling ourselves out of the ditch.

Worse yet, the glut’s continued existence will feed a succession of asset bubbles until we confront it, head on, and find ways to soak up the excess.

Yes, we can blame the City and Wall Street for turning the global savings glut into fissile material. But that’s like saying, “hyenas do what hyenas do”. Given extraordinarily lax regulation and a flood of money to play with, bankers were just acting according to their incentive schemes. They merely took advantage of the opportunities the glut presented. The real culprits are thrifty Germans, and state-owned enterprises in China – along with governments of other countries, of course, turning a blind eye to the escalating problems.

well, we just gotta:

well, we just are:

The next generation of composite armor bomb resistant vehicles will be in Afghanistan along with the 30,000 extra troops.

The $1.4 million M-ATV seats four plus one gunner. Powered by a 370 hp Caterpillar C7, it weighs just under 25,000 pounds. Top speed is 65 mph using four terrain settings with central tire inflation.

Gregor Macdonald:

I am forecasting that the world will not successfully transition from oil to a broad basket of renewable energy and power sources over the next twenty years.

Instead, I strongly favor an outcome in which oil, the construction fuel for the global build-out of new power generation, becomes so expensive that the world becomes energy poor, and turns instead back to coal.

In case you hadn’t noticed, the process of energy impoverishment has already begun.

Those who would propose a successful energy transition over the next 20 years have failed to produce a holistic model that pays respect to both the history of previous energy transitions, and to the hurdles that lay before us.

When you’re impoverished you burn coal.