environment: climate change Middle East petroleum subsidies
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 15: Shhhhh! Don’t Mention The War!
Time Magazine runs an opinion piece by Michael Mandelbaum, stating that we must reduce the impact of the Middle East on our foreign and domestic policy. Duh. Naturally, the closest he comes to mentioning climate change is in these paragraphs:
Lower U.S. oil consumption would also weaken oil-dependent leaders outside the Middle East who pursue anti-American policies: Hugo Chávez of Venezuela and Vladimir Putin of Russia. While the world will not be able to do entirely without Middle Eastern oil for many decades, substantially lowering the amount of oil we use would reduce the region’s significance while shifting the balance of power between producers and consumers in favor of consumers — that is, in favor of the U.S. and its friends. (See what Barack Obama needs to do to improve five international areas.)
The best way to reduce oil use is to raise the price of gasoline. People would then use less of it. In the short term, they would drive less and make more use of public transportation. Over the long term, they would demand fuel-efficient vehicles. At the same time, higher gasoline prices would make renewable fuels like ethanol and electrically powered cars economically viable.
While West European countries and Japan impose high taxes on gasoline, the U.S., the world’s largest consumer, does not. Compared with what the U.S. national interest requires, gasoline is ruinously cheap for Americans. The refusal of the U.S. to charge itself as much for gasoline as is good for it (and for other countries) is the single greatest foreign policy failure of the past three decades.
So I wrote a letter trying to draw a connection.
Michael Mandelbaum has perfectly articulated almost all the reasons that America needs to transform its relationship with the Middle East. He notes correctly that US petroleum pricing polity is self-destructive — by subsidizing fossil-fuel consumption so heavily, we’ve created an economy in which waste is rewarded, with all-too-predictable results. Cleaning up after the past century’s profligacy isn’t going to come cheap, and coping with the effects of global warming (heatwaves, fires, floods, catastrophic storms, oceanic acidification, and drought, to name a few) is going to be very expensive indeed. We (and our children) will be paying the bill for the energy we (and our parents) thought was almost free. It’s too bad that Mandelbaum didn’t mention the looming climate crisis, for of all the consequences of our addiction to Middle-Eastern oil, global climate change is the one which will do the most damage in the long run.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change peat fires Russia
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 14: Peat Fires
Jeebus. This sounds really depressing:
Firefighters laid down a pipe to a nearby lake and pumped 100 gallons of water every minute, around the clock, until the surface of what is known as Fire No. 3 was a muddy expanse of charred stumps.
And still the fire burned on.
Under the surface, fire crept through a virtually impenetrable peat bog, spewing the smoke that — until the wind shifted on Thursday, providing what meteorologists said was likely to be temporary relief — had been choking the Russian capital this summer.
The peat bogs were drained up to ninety years ago, when Soviet electrical generators burned peat. Naturally, nobody thought to reflood them after they’d been harvested. Now they’re just sitting there up to fifteen feet deep. And when they catch on fire, the firefighters’ lives really really really suck:
Fighting peat fires is an exhausting, muddy job, taking weeks or months, in which hardly a flame is visible. Matted, rotting vegetation smolders and steams deep underground.
In my letter, I tried to make the peat fires a specific example of a broader trend of disregarding the long-term consequences of ecological destruction…consequences which are going to affect all of us, sooner rather than later.
Russia’s peat fires are the disastrous result of an earlier failure to respect an ecosystem’s integrity. The early Soviet engineers who drained the peat bogs to fuel their generators but never reflooded them couldn’t have anticipated a smoke-filled Moscow. The Russian crisis is emblematic of the global one; our fossil-fueled economy (so rewarding in the short run) has triggered unintended long-term consequences all over the globe. Smoke, fires, drought, flood, wind, rain, weirdness.
The first rule of getting out of a hole is to recognize that you are in one. Our information economy must recognize and address the connection between global climate change and local environmental crises like the one choking Russia. The second rule is to stop digging. Our energy economy must move off fossil fuels as rapidly as possible.
Warren Senders
environment: climate change heat wave LA Times
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 13: L.A. Heat Edition.
There’s a heat wave expected in LA this weekend, says the LA Times.
Not a standard boilerplate LTE.
A midsummer heat wave is not particularly remarkable. They happen all the time. But there are more and more of them happening these days, in the U.S. and around the world. As a consequence of climate change, we’re getting very extreme weather, and we’re getting it more often. While it’s impossible to say that global warming caused a specific weather event, climatologists have predicted for two decades that it will bring about ever more frequent extremes of temperature and precipitation. In the past, climate change was something that would happen in the future. But the past is gone and the future is now. Climate change is happening to us. News media must begin including this information as part of their print and online articles on weather conditions. People need to understand what’s going on so they can make informed decisions; ignorance is no longer an option.
Warren Senders
Oh, and for what it’s worth, I only became aware that there was a TV show by that name a few seconds before hitting “publish.”
environment Politics: Al Gore Barack Obama Deficit reduction idiots Nancy Pelosi Renewable Energy
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 12: Common-Sense Deficit Syndrome? GAFB!
Sometimes I just want to bang my head against a wall.
Solar industry officials are pleading with President Obama to restore billions of dollars in renewable energy loan guarantees that Congress is at least temporarily cutting to pay for emergency education and Medicaid help to states and other policy priorities.
The loss of these loan guarantee funds could help “send solar development into a tailspin that will be difficult to reverse,” according to a letter to Obama sent Monday from Rhone Resch, president and CEO of the Solar Energy Industries Association (SEIA).
House lawmakers Tuesday are slated to approve a $26.1 billion state education and Medicaid funding package the Senate passed last week that would be partially paid for by slashing $1.5 billion in renewable energy-loan guarantees approved in last year’s economic stimulus bill.
“These rescissions put into jeopardy the green jobs that the administration has touted as part of our clean-energy future and put us further behind the rest of the world,” Gore said on his website Monday afternoon.
I’m not a professional Leftist; I’m more of an amateur. But by Grabthar’s Hammer, I am pretty fucking pissed off about this.
My emotional state is concealed, however, by my erudition.
Dear President Obama and Speaker Pelosi —
It is of the utmost importance that the $3.5 billion which has been taken from the renewable energy and transmission loan-guarantee program be restored. While deficit reduction must be part of our thinking, there is no alternative to pursuing renewable energy with all our attention, enthusiasm and funding.
We cannot continue to burn oil and coal in the years to come. Not only is our national security complicated by our financial entanglements with Saudi Arabia and other OPEC countries, our long-term survival is at stake. With atmospheric CO2 well on track to be over 400 ppm within a year or two, the fight against global warming has already been significantly compromised. In order to maintain a world climate suitable for human survival and prosperity, we must change our energy economy without delay.
If the United States is to maintain a role as a world leader, then we cannot afford to shrug off the problems of smaller states; we cannot afford to wait for India and China to reduce their carbon footprints before acting on our own. The laws of physics pay no heed to political exigencies; greenhouse gases know nothing of election-year strategies. The problem of global climate change is the defining one of our generation, and we must tackle it on all levels: as individuals, as communities, as regions, as states, as a country, and as part of a global society.
At this moment in the world’s history, cutting funding for renewable energy is a grotesque abdication of our responsibilities to one another and the planet as a whole. Please act with dispatch and resolve to ensure that financial resources are restored to renewable energy programs. Failing to spend that money is a foolishness we cannot afford.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
environment: Portugal Renewable Energy
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 11: Paying The Piper By The Note
The New York Times ran an article on Portugal’s transition to renewable energy. It’s a good piece and well worth the read.
While Portugal’s experience shows that rapid progress is achievable, it also highlights the price of such a transition. Portuguese households have long paid about twice what Americans pay for electricity, and prices have risen 15 percent in the last five years, probably partly because of the renewable energy program, the International Energy Agency says.
Although a 2009 report by the agency called Portugal’s renewable energy transition a “remarkable success,” it added, “It is not fully clear that their costs, both financial and economic, as well as their impact on final consumer energy prices, are well understood and appreciated.”
My letter to the Times (I’m hoping for a third time in print this year!):
If Portugal’s citizens pay twice as much for their energy as Americans do, it’s tempting to seize on this as compelling evidence that renewable energy sources are doomed to failure in the marketplace. But such an analysis leaves out the crucial fact that America’s citizens have only paid for a fraction of their fossil-fueled energy consumption over the last century. We have bought our “cheap energy” on credit, deferring the expenses of cleanup and restoration to some point in the future. Now the bill is due, and it’s bigger than most of us expected. When the costs of environmental destruction, public health crises and global warming are factored in, Portugal’s “pay-as-you-go” renewable energy economy looks more attractive every day. America needs to make the switch soon; our dependency on oil and coal is both environmentally and economically unsustainable.
Warren Senders
environment: Boston Herald idiots
by Warren
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I Penetrate Shallowly Into Enemy Territory
I was ego-searching and discovered that the Boston Herald had run one of my letters. Notably, they’d done so without checking on my bona fides.
Here’s their edited version (the article which triggered the letter was about the current heat waves):
It’s revealing that the phrase “climate change” appears in this story exactly once – when mentioning a Maine-based research center (“Above-normal temperatures persist in Northeast,” Aug. 5).
The facts are unequivocal: The heat wave pummeling the Northeast is exactly what climatologists have predicted for decades (and what Republicans have been mocking and ignoring for just as long). This year is on track to be the hottest year on record.
How much worse will it have to get before our media decide the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced is more important than, say, celebrity prison experiences?
And here’s my original:
It’s revealing that the phrase “climate change” appears in this article exactly once: when mentioning a Maine-based research center. The facts are unequivocal: the heat wave pummeling the Northeast is exactly what climatologists have predicted for decades (and what Republicans have been mocking and ignoring for just as long). 2010 is on track to be the hottest year on record. According to scientists, even if we took dramatic and immediate action to drastically reduce CO2 emissions, we’d still be looking at worldwide crop failures, droughts, storms, and ecological collapses. How much worse will it have to get before our newspapers and broadcast media decide the greatest existential threat humanity has ever faced is more important than, say, celebrity prison experiences? The Boston Herald’s treatment of climate change has long been a flagrant disregard of journalistic responsibility.
Warren Senders
I’m surprised they printed it, but not surprised that they left off the last sentence.
The comments in the online edition are worth a look.
I wonder if they’ve printed other letters without letting me know.
Education Personal: assessment epistemology learning teaching
by Warren
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Things I Learned In School, Pt. II
More thoughts on things I learned about teaching and learning…from teachers.
High School:
As a student in a public high school in Sudbury, Massachusetts, I had some friends who were officially my teachers; we talked about life, learning, politics, culture…and if they had to give me a C or a D in class, I really didn’t care. It was obviously a game we all had to play for the benefit of…who?
There was one history teacher, Mr. M_______, who taught a single course: a comprehensive year-long survey of Russian history. A classroom virtuoso, his teaching was part lecture, part dance, part abstract painting (his hyperkinetic scribbling on the chalkboard served as an outlet for an incessant need to move), part arts and crafts. He conceived Russian History not as a body-of-material-to-be-mastered, but as a medium through which students found out about the world and about themselves. At the time I took his course, which was open only to juniors and seniors, he was employing a very unusual grading method:
“In this class,” he said on the first day, “you are granted the symbol A. Depending on your contributions and participation, you will either receive a Large A, for ‘amazing,’ or a small a, for ‘awful.’ In either case you will have the symbol A. I do not want any of you doing work in the class because you crave a symbol. I want you doing the work because you genuinely want to do the work.”
It was a wonderful course. And what I took away from it was a general gestalt understanding of the sweep of Russian history…and a huge practical insight about what effective teaching could and should be. It didn’t matter that in the first semester I got an A and in the second an a. That, if anything, served to reinforce my growing awareness that the grades I got had nothing at all to do with what I learned.
Lesson: The System may require grades, but there are many ways to skin a cat.
From my freshman year in high school, I knew that I wanted to be on the school newspaper. I joined the staff and began writing and participating in the marathon layout sessions. It was my ambition to be the editor of the paper in my senior year; I felt this strongly enough that when my parents got one-year faculty appointments in Toronto for the duration of my junior year, I argued that I had to stay behind, or I would lose my place in the queue. I lived with my grandmother that year, and I kept my place (as “Associate Editor”); when my senior year began, I was the Editor, and I did a hell of a job, if I do say so myself. The paper had a Faculty Adviser, who stayed out of our way and signed forms as required. He was responsible for giving us all grades; everyone got an A. The grade was required by the system, but it was irrelevant to my motivation, which was purely that I wanted to edit the newspaper.
Lesson: You can get a good grade for doing a good job, and it still doesn’t necessarily mean anything.
environment Politics: Ed Markey Republican obstructionism
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 10: He’s One Of The Best
My congressman said something great.
Rep. Edward Markey (D-Mass.) suggested a novel use Saturday for a 100-square-mile ice sheet that has broken off Greenland.
“An iceberg four times the size of Manhattan has broken off Greenland, creating plenty of room for global warming deniers to start their own country,” Markey said in a statement. “So far, 2010 has been the hottest year on record, and scientists agree arctic ice is a canary in a coal mine that provides clear warnings on climate.”
I figured I’d indulge myself tonight and send him a congratulatory letter. I imagine the poor guy’s always getting hammered by wingnuts. So here’s my Dear Ed letter:
Dear Congressman Markey,
Your remarks about the obstructionist approach of the Republican party on climate change issues are absolutely correct. I am sickened by the behavior of climate denialists, and fear its consequences for all of us.
It is a sad commentary on the present state of our politics that just about the only good news I’ve had on climate for a long time is the fact that you called them out for the selfish, sloppy, cynical sociopaths they have become. No words are strong enough to express my gratitude to you — or my outrage at the dysfunctional wreckage they have made of our system of government.
In the past, “climate change” was in the future. As the recent extreme weather events all over the world show us, the past is over. Climate change is now. And yet our media represent the subject as something still being debated, with a one-to-one ratio between climate scientist and industry shill. When they report on Russian fires, Connecticut’s storms and flooding, or the heat wave in New York, the connection with climate change is never made. It is a dangerously irresponsible omission.
In the battle for media attention, the best bumper-sticker wins. Climate-change advocates need better soundbites to prevail, in a media system that is rigged against us.
Ask your colleagues: if ninety-seven out of a hundred oncologists told you, “it’s cancer,” would you go to the hospital? Or would you choose to trust the three percent of them who said they “weren’t sure?” Why, then, do you choose to ignore the ninety-seven percent of climate scientists who are telling us we’ve got a serious problem?
Tell your colleagues: if a freak snowstorm in Washington, DC disproves global warming, then the swollen belly of a starving child disproves world hunger.
And I think we should start calling that iceberg “Inhofistan.”
These people have no shame, conscience or scruples. Keep speaking as strongly as you did today.
Yours Sincerely,
Warren Senders
Education India Indian music music: S.G. Devasthali taleem
by Warren
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Raga Bhatiyar: Taleem from S.G. Devasthali, 1994
This clip has just gone up on the S.G. Devasthali memorial page. It’s 30 minutes of detailed instruction from Guruji to me and Vijaya in early 1994.
Hope you enjoy it.
environment: Boston Herald climate change Russia wildfires
by Warren
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Month 8, Day 9: Fake Astroturf Redux
Man, this thing works great. The Boston Herald ran an AP article on Russia’s fires, so I zipped through this one in 10 minutes.
At first glance the Associated Press story on the fires currently raging through Russia are unexceptionable. Closer examination reveals that important facts have been left out: the devastating heat wave that has triggered those wildfires is part of a worldwide trend of increasingly severe weather — a consequence of global warming, or climate change, or global heating, or, to use the most accurate term, climaticide. Floods, heatwaves, tropical storms, droughts — we’re going to see more and more of them, and they’ll do more damage and destroy more lives than ever before. To respond appropriately to the threats posed by the climate crisis, the citizenry must by fully and accurately informed. By failing to connect the crisis in Russia to the broader crisis that affects all of us on Earth, the Associated Press has failed in its responsibility to journalism and to the American People.
Warren Senders