The biggest pinch.
Brad has a post up about the alarmingly high prices that gas could reach in the future, and he asks people how they’re coping.
But seriously: we need to solve this problem because it’s not getting better. I’m fortunate in that my current job allows me to work from home once or twice a week, although I’m still spending around $50 a week on gas. I’m trying to organize a group of my fellow employees to pitch in for a shuttle service that will take us from the commuter rail to the office every day; how are the rest of you coping?
Luckily, I barely have to drive, since I work from home and live in the city, which means I can walk or bicycle almost everywhere I go. I even braved bicycling to the dentist and back to get a filling done. (My first cavity ever, and my reason for concern was I had no idea how scary it would be and whether or not I’d have to be sedated. Luckily, no. I’m not that big a weenie.) I think I drive to Marc’s studio more than any other place, and even that will probably not be an issue after we move even more central in a couple of months. I often seriously consider selling my truck, but a pick-up truck is a useful thing to have and I just know that if I did sell it, then the next month would be when I started to have need to haul shit around. In fact, the new place has a garden, so I’ll soon have a more immediate need to haul large amounts of compost and mulch, so there you go.
My main concern at this point is inflation of everything else, especially food prices. I don’t drive much, but I eat a whole lot, and food is getting expensive, and I think transportation costs are a big part of it. And of course, oil costs affect the cost of growing or raising the food in the first place, so rising oil prices hit food production at every point in the process. Americans are doing a lot better than people in other parts of the world, but still, it’s a belt-tightener.
What are your concerns? Not everyone can do what I do and just bike everywhere they need to go. What creative solutions to high gas prices have you come up with?
Have you ever tried to talk someone out of a bad idea? Maybe the person they’re dating is all wrong for them. Or a job change or some economic investment is just going to end in tragedy? If so, you’ve probably gotten a quick lesson in basic psychology. A percentage of people are going to be open-minded and listen to your objections, and if you’re actually right, they’ll consider the evidence and take your advice. Most people will get defensive, however, and refuse to listen. Some people will get so defensive that they’ll actually double down to prove the nay-sayers wrong—they’ll marry that bad boyfriend or put more money into the bad investment. They will, rather than risk the chance that they might get proven wrong and open themselves to a chorus of “I told you sos”, will live in denial about their bad decisions until the last possible moment when it’s becoming clear that they cannot sustain this bad decision any longer.
Now, the thing about this is that everyone does this sometimes. I realize there are a lot of people on the internet who preen like they rarely make bad decisions, and when they do, they recant immediately, but you’ll see that such people rarely offer examples of how this has actually happened in their lives. We all get into the rationalization cycle, some more than others, but we all do it. If you come across someone who claims to be above rationalization or standing by bad choices, that person probably does it more than anyone else, because they’ve got a mistake-free self-image that means they are especially prone to rationalization.
If pressed, most of us bicycling fans will say we do it for the exercise, to save money on gas, and for the environment. But now this Hungarian PSA promoting bicycling has exposed the truth. You might not want to play this where office mates can hear it. (Via, with translation.)
But I can’t help but think that as silly as it is, there’s a grain of truth to the claims. Lack of exercise is brutal to the sex drive, and something as well-rounded as bicycling to get exercise probably does have some health benefits that carry over to the bedroom.
I obviously do not support this:
Terrible throw, too.
The pamphlets thrown by the male accomplice identified the pair as the “Greenwash Guerillas,” who wrote that they were acting “on behalf of the earth (sic) and all true environmentalists.”
One side of the pamphlet contains an excerpt from a September 2006 review of Friedman’s book, “The World is Flat,” written by Raymond Lotta for the journal “Revolution,” which styles itself as the “Voice of the Revolutionary Communist Party, USA.” The review is highly critical of Friedman, who the review claims cannot see his own errors while “seated in the business class of his analytical jetliner.”
The other side contains five bullet-points explaining why “Thomas Friedman deserves a pie in the face,” which include reasons like “his sickeningly cheery applaud for free market capitalism’s conquest of the planet,” and “for helping turn environmentalism into a fake plastic consumer product for the privileged.”
The pamphlet declares “Thomas Friedman’s ‘Green’ as fake and toxic to human and planetary health as the cool-whip (sic) covering his face.”
This story is kind of interesting, because it’s the classic example of a story where the lede was chosen on sexiness, not because of what the story is really about. The hook is a “whodathunkit”.
Profit margins on gasoline sales are razor thin. Indeed, some gas stations are losing money on credit card sales, once the fees are factored in.
How do they stay in business? More and more a gas station’s bread and butter is, well, bread and butter — and the coffee and candy bars it sells in its convenience store. Most of these items generate much higher profits than gas…..
Jeff Lenard, spokesman for the National Association of Convenience Stores, estimates that gasoline accounts for 70 percent of a typical station’s revenues, but only 30 percent of its profits.
An aside - why does it seem like when I go out of town that come back with a cold of some kind? It feels like my head is about to explode today, and I’m hacking up a lung. Speaking of health care, check this out.
Nothing to see here, move along — Hospitals Reuse Medical Devices To Lower Costs.
In a bid to save costs and stem a rising tide of medical waste, hospitals are recycling a growing number of medical devices labeled as single-use, from scissors and scrubs to the sharp blades surgeons use to saw through bones.OK. Saving the planet is a laudable goal, but I wonder what controls are in place to ensure appropriate oversight of the reprocessing. It seems like a situation ripe for corruption at the expense of good (safe) health care.Recycling medical devices labeled for single use is legal as long as certain Food and Drug Administration guidelines are followed. But the practice, which involves shipping devices to reprocessing facilities to be cleaned, sterilized and tested for reuse, has raised concerns about safety. Medical device makers say their single-use products are just that, and pose a higher risk of failure and harm when recycled.
…At Catholic Healthcare West, the nation’s eighth-largest hospital system, a wide range of medical devices labeled as “single use” are reprocessed each year. Last year, the San Francisco-based concern figures it reduced waste volume by 41 tons and saved $1.8 million.
“The safe use of these reprocessed devices helps us conserve resources so we can be more cost-effective in delivering care” says Sister Susan Vickers, vice president of community health. “And we are diverting significant amounts of medical waste, which definitely benefits our planet.”
When I posted this at the Blend, one reader made this unsettling comment:
Disclaimer: I work for a medical device company, but have held these views since the time when I was working in hospitals as an employee.Mad Cow and CJD are caused by prions, snippets of protein that can invade cells and damage them. no sterilization technique can guarantee to eradicate prions.
I encourage everyone to advocate for their own health care and ask your health care providers whether they reuse single-use medical devices and to ask for new product if you (or your SO or family) need some kind of invasive care.
Via Feministing, I have to admit this article from Reason by Ronald Bailey about the bullshit threat of a “demographic winter” and why childlessness is just fucking great cracked me up. Say what you will about Reason, but they are consistent about their libertarian values in a way that most conservatives who claim to be libertarian aren’t. As I’ve noted in the past, a lot of libertarian utopian fantasizing requires a belief that women will have communal values to hold society together while every man is out for himself, but at Reason, they go even further and allow a feminist libertarianism to thrive. Hilarity ensues, because it turns out that this ideology circumvents guilt-tripping women into setting aside their own life goals to make more patriots for the nation.
There are many reasons social and economic that people (read: women, for the purposes of the anti-choice doom-sayers) don’t want children, or at least many children. They’re expensive, they’re time constraints, and our fast-paced economy doesn’t have time for the slower lives required to raise children properly. All this is true, but even if you managed to fix those problems, you can still expect people, especially educated women, to just opt out.
If you want to gauge how much a social problem is determined by society to be a matter of individual morality more than a collective problem that can only be addressed by a collective solution, you could do worse than to ask, “Are individual women considered the gatekeepers/middle class white women the moral exemplars on this issue?” Rising obesity and nutrition-related health issues? If we considered it a social problem, we’d look to economic controls on corn syrup, restructuring our food distribution, building more opportunities for exercise into our city structures. But if we considered it a matter of morality, we’d simply demand that women show off their moral purity by having a race for the smallest waistline. STDs and unwanted pregnancy: If it were a social problem, we’d have sex education and free condoms for all. But instead we tell women to keep their legs shut and save for daddy their husbands. Just because a lot of people have abandoned religion except in the nominal sense doesn’t mean that we’ve spared women from duties as the moral mainstays of families and society. We’ve just redefined the duties.
Which is what troubled me about this story in the NY Times about “Ecomoms” and how environmentalism is becoming a trendy hobby-duty for suburban housewives, a replacement for PTA meetings, church bake sales, and other demonstrations of the housewife duty to uphold her family’s moral status in a community. It’s not that I think it’s the worst thing in the world if the richest and most wasteful people in the world rein it in a little in terms of environmental destruction. It’s just that once an issue has been coded as the moral responsibility of housewives, it tends to stay there, and larger collective solutions drift out of view.
By the way, has everyone read the blog Stuff White People Like? It’s my new obsession. I am so jealous I didn’t think of it first. It’s fucking brilliant. It makes me as happy as Dadsmacker.
As usual with the NY Times, the promise of any sort of new moral duty that will get the bitches out of your workplace and back into the kitchen where they belong causes the editors to yell, “Can this green light get any greener?!” The ecomom trend causes swoons, because it promises to load up the household with so much shit to do that women simply have to quit their jobs. Added bonus is the opportunity to subtly mock women for prattling.
I’ll tell you what:
When we’re all drowning in the Arctic Ocean, I’ll be very relieved to know that it may not have been humans that caused it.
I’ll tell you what else:
I’m simply on the edge of my seat to find out what NBC Nightly News has to tell me about how boys and girls are just different.
[Saturday, 10:30 AM: I'm finally back home in Durham after spending the last two days either at BlogWorld, the airport or in the air. Need. Sleep. The item below I wrote a few days ago, but wanted feedback from folks out there who are in drought areas.]
One town knows what will happen. We're under drought conditions here in NC; while the water problems in Florida, Alabama and Georgia have been making headlines, all folks living in areas that need a ton of rain need to take a look at what is happening in Orme, Tennessee — the taps have run dry. (AP):
As I said above, the situations in Florida, Alabama and Georgia are bad — even getting ugly. Water wars have emerged and the governors of those states wanted the feds to intervene.The severe drought tightening like a vise across the Southeast has threatened the water supply of cities large and small, sending politicians scrambling for solutions. But Orme, about 40 miles west of Chattanooga and 150 miles northwest of Atlanta, is a town where the worst-case scenario has already come to pass: The water has run out.
The mighty waterfall that fed the mountain hamlet has been reduced to a trickle, and now the creek running through the center of town is dry.
Three days a week, the volunteer fire chief hops in a 1961 fire truck at 5:30 a.m. — before the school bus blocks the narrow road — and drives a few miles to an Alabama fire hydrant. He meets with another truck from nearby New Hope, Ala. The two drivers make about a dozen runs back and forth, hauling about 20,000 gallons of water from the hydrant to Orme's tank.
“I'm not God. I can't make it rain. But I'll get you the water I can get you,” Reames tells residents.
Between 6 and 9 every evening, the town scurries. Residents rush home from their jobs at the carpet factories outside town to turn on washing machines. Mothers start cooking supper. Fathers fill up water jugs. Kids line up to take showers.
“You never get used to it,” says Cheryl Evans, a 55-year-old who has lived in town all her life. “When you're used to having water and you ain't got it, it's strange. I can't tell you how many times I've turned on the faucet before remembering the water's been cut.”
“You have to be in a rush,” she says. “At 6 p.m., I start my supper, turn on my washer, fill all my water jugs, take my shower.”
Alabama Gov. Bob Riley and Florida Gov. Charlie Crist previously had fought Georgia's effort to keep more water, arguing that its demands were unreasonable and that reducing river flows could cripple their economies.Do you know where your water resources come from? Are they shared with other states? I can see the problem getting ugly fast as one community charges another with waste and cuts the tap off.On Thursday, they accepted the recommendation, but only as part of continuing negotiations.
…The dispute centers on how much water the Corps of Engineers holds back in federal reservoirs near the head of two river basins in north Georgia that flow south into Florida and Alabama.
The fast-growing Atlanta region relies on the lakes for drinking water. But power plants in Florida and Alabama depend on healthy flows in the rivers, as do farms, commercial fisheries, industrial users and municipalities. The corps also is required to release adequate flows to ensure habitats for species protected by the Endangered Species Act.
One controversy here, and I assume it’s true elsewhere, is that the city wanted to require private subdivisions to restrict lawn watering. One news report aired said that some homeowner covenants require people to maintain their lawns (not only height, but quality/color of grass, etc.) and the city apparently cannot force the issue. This is insane.
According to the San Antonio newspaper, as of this morning, there are still 20,000 people stranded on roofs awaiting aid in the Mexican state of Tabasco. 1.5 million have been displaced from their homes due to heavy flooding.
There is much to be outraged about besides nature’s utter indifference to human suffering. Brownfemipower notes the racism of the coverage of the flood:
Fox News: Mexico Floods Swamp 900,000 Homes; Disease Outbreak Feared
UPDATED Fox News: Thousands Depart Mexico Flood Zone Amid Disease Fears, Reported Looting
CNN: Devastating floods prompt outbreak fears in Mexico
MSNbc: Headline news:Teacher arrested after allegedly fleeing with boy (scroll down and down and down some more, and there nestled between sports and politics, is a small little link announcing “Mexico state 80 submerged”
ABCnews: Headline News: “Teacher Arrested In Mexico” World news section: Nothing
Detroit Free Press: Mexicans flee as region floods: Infectious waterborne diseases could surface
AP: Mexico Fears Disease Outbreak From Flood
Bloomber.com:Mexico’s Red Cross Is Preparing for Disease in Flooded Tabasco
This should surprise no one; I remember how, in the wake of Katrina, conservatives were more angry that people were looting than the fact that there were corpses floating in the street, and the threat of even temporary price controls to keep people from dying of dehydration sent many a free market cheerleader straight to the fainting couch. That the majority of victims were black drove so much of the casual cruelty towards survivors.
Unsurprisingly, the right wing media has swung into “stir up the aimless anger of the morons out there” mode in response to Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And they’re grabbing for the stupidest retort imaginable:
“Ask what?” you might be wondering. I’m getting to the question of what it is, exactly, that Al Gore did to enhance “peace” such that he has now won a Nobel Peace Prize.
My god, that’s a startlingly good question. How do we know what Al Gore did to win the prize? As we all know, the Nobel committee refuses to explain why they give prizes—
“for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change”
Of course, the Townhall columnist then just rants about how global warming is a myth until my eyes glazed over, so I didn’t get around to seeing if he also rants that gravity is a myth as well as the idea that babies come from sex instead of the stork.
I suppose that if one puts a lot of effort into shutting down all brain functions except for the ones that allow you to move around a little and enjoy second rate sitcoms, then the relationship between global warming and peace might not seem immediately apparent. For the rest of us, however, it makes perfect sense—few things are less conducive to peace than non-stop worldwide environmental catastrophe. Coastal flooding worldwide will create a massive refugee problem, which will in turn inspire the same kind of nasty, racist warfare that often happens when you have legions of misplaced people seeking refuge with neighbors that might be hostile to them. Also, less land and less fresh water are also predicted results of global warming, which means that we’re going to be seeing warfare as people fight over diminishing resources.
I’m very close to finishing The Shock Doctrine, so I can’t say if Naomi Klein addresses this issue in the book, but it’s worth asking in light of the fact that our current neocon philosophy that disaster is good for business: What if part of the conservative hostility towards the reality of global warming comes from a whisper of a hope for that worldwide trauma? War and disaster is good for business, after all. Just a thought.
But regardless of the specific motivations for denying the truth of global warming, there is no doubt that the hand-waving now that Gore has won the Nobel Peace Prize will be about that, not really the man himself. Holding out the view that global warming isn’t real is increasingly becoming a sure sign that you’re a crank, and this Nobel Peace Prize stamp of approval is just another log on the fire. Ranting about how global warming is a conspiracy cooked up by the entire world for reasons that don’t seem to quite make sense has about as much intellectual legitimacy as refusing to wash your hands because of the poisonous fluoride at this point.
Celebrating the beauty of contraceptions through jewelry is a good step.
Ah, the clash between reproductive rights and environmentalism raises its ugly head once again. Jill reads this article by Daniel Engber that suggests that Americans—who are the most massive per capita polluters on the planet, mind you—cut back on our births to one or none to save the planet. She dismisses the idea on the theory that there lies the path to coercion. I’m going to disagree. First of all, dismissing coercion out of hand in a situation as dire as ours concerns me. Not that one should conclude that coercion is the best bet, but desperate times should at least allow for the consideration of desperate measures.
Still, I think we’re far from even having to worry about coercing people, China-style. First of all, it’s best not to make an assault on human dignity right out of the gate without trying other measures. Coercion is unlikely to work, anyway, since people would rebel and create all sorts of nasty problems. You just don’t want to go there if you can at all help it.
But we don’t have to go there. At this point in time, the experiment of creating incentives and social pressure to limit your children to one or none hasn’t even been tried, so we have a great opportunity here. There’s tremendous social pressure on women to have two or more children, and if we could just counter that message through incentive programs, we might be able to dramatically reduce the American birth rate without even getting close to being pushy. Or we could fail miserably, of course, but that could happen with any plan of action and I think a genuine attempt at voluntary population reduction would be the likeliest to work without creating pushback.
Most hurricane damage is caused by flooding from storm surges.
I really wanted to see the science bloggers panel at Yearly Kos, but Jill was on a panel scheduled at the same time, and so I decided to see hers instead. Tough decisions abounded at Yearly Kos, but that was the worst, because I think that science blogging has a great deal of potential to help scientists communicate better with the public. So I can’t report on the panel, but I did read Chris Mooney’s book Storm World: Hurricanes, Politics, and the Battle Over Global Warming this past week and can report back on that. For those who don’t know, Chris is a science writer and blogger who writes for The Intersection, and he’s primarily interested in hurricane science and in creating relationships between scientists and the public. This book addresses both issues and well.
The book might seem dry on the surface, since it’s ostensibly about the scientific debate over whether or not global warming is affecting hurricane frequency and intensity, but it’s actually a captivating read, because this debate has been dramatically intensified by the fact that there’s a lot of laymen invested in both sides of the debate for blatantly partisan reasons. But I hate that word “partisan”, because it implies that Mooney is running with a six of one, half a dozen of another story, and he’s not. Being no fool, Mooney supports the environmentalists that are in the right about global warming, and his quarrels with them are about tactics, not content, and while he’s sympathetic to the fact that some global warming “skeptics” aren’t bad people or necessarily bad scientists, he also uses scare quotes around the word “skeptic” to remind the audience that skepticism comes from a pro-science attitude and anyone who dismisses the overwhelming evidence out of hand is no skeptic.
Hurricanes are an interesting angle of attack. As Mooney points out, even though there’s other consequences of global warming that are more severe and more certain than intensified hurricanes, the rapid-fire destructive potential of hurricanes tends to draw public attention. With 50% of Americans living within 50 miles of a coastline, intensified hurricanes are an irresistible ploy to get people to care about global warming. I’d add, though he doesn’t go into this, that the relationship between hurricanes and global warming is also very easy to convey to people who don’t get science too well. The theory behind why global warming will intensify and increase hurricanes is easy to convey in a simplified form. Basically, hurricanes get their power from the heat in the ocean. You don’t even have to explain the mechanics of it because most people are aware that hurricanes form in warm weather and break up once they hit land and are deprived of their energy source. If ocean heat is the fuel of hurricanes, then the more heat in the oceans, the more fuel for the hurricanes. The drama and the simplicity of it are arresting, even as there are other potential consequences of global warming that are much more alarming (widespread drought, for instance, is far fucking scarier if you think about it).
Gay penguins: Proof that conservatives need to be alarmed about what’s happening in the animal kingdom.
Roy Edroso found Roger Scruton whining that conservatives deserve to be the real environmentalists, because liberals are whiners who don’t deserve the cool label. Of course, his is a version of environmentalism that doesn’t require actual solutions, but otherwise, his proposal is fitting a long tradition of conservatives co-opting popular liberal causes in hopes that by taking on the label and confusing everyone, they can defeat the cause. Think of Feminists For Life (anti-feminist group) or morons that latch onto one dependent clause in a speech by Martin Luther King Jr. to justify their belief that the best way to defeat racism is to refuse to do anything about it. In one sense, there is a bit of truth to the idea that conservatives could be the “real” environmentalists—after all, continuing environmental policies under American capitalism could eventually kill off humanity altogether and there’s a possibility that without us, the planet might recover over time. We can hope.
But there’s at least one giant obstacle between conservatives and embracing their calling as true environmentalists—the shit-for-brains issue. Witness, for instance, WorldNetDaily suddenly going tree-hugger during a long process of clutching at any straws they can find to attack women who have sex. Yes, they’ve discovered that estrogen mimickers in the environment are causing damage, creating intersexed fish, a problem that could have severe consequences for population replacement. Since they hear the word “estrogen” and immediately think of craven slut-beasts, suggesting that the only culprit worth fingering must be women taking birth control pills.
While environmentalists are usually vocal about perceived threats ranging from pesticides to global warming, there is a silence when it comes to one threat already harming the water supply: hormones from birth-control pills.
Notice the word “perceived”. Ordinary human logic would dictate that relatively small amounts of synthetic estrogen being pissed out by the Sluts of America wouldn’t really be on the same level of a threat as the huge amounts of pesticides that are sprayed directly on crops and aren’t being absorbed on any level at all before the rain dumps them directly into the ground and into streams. Luckily, the WND article completely ignores the face that many pesticides are estrogen-mimickers. Unless the Sluts of America are practicing birth control by showering in DDT, then contraceptives are not really the problem.
But human logic is not like wingnut logic. In wingnut logic, human females who control when they give birth are emasculating the men of our species, ergo non-human emasculation must somehow be related to it. Every time you don’t run a high risk of “consequences” for having sex, a fish loses his testicles. It’s probably just a matter of time before WND argues that humans using condoms are the cause of the gay penguins in the Central Park Zoo. Actually, that sentence I wrote may end up being the scientific (even liberals say it!) justification behind the argument.
A Dallas law firm is creating a global warming division to handle what they expect will be an avalanche of global warming-related lawsuits in the coming years. Marc has some commentary. All I can say is it’s bizarre to live in a country where half of us are bracing for the coming catastrophe and the other half is dithering away in denial, or worse, claiming that there’s some sort of benefit to having major cities like Manhattan under water.
Today’s WingNutDaily poll:
Who or what is most to blame for high gas prices?
There are actually 24 rocket scientists blaming it all on the peons changing the signs.
Fair and balanced.
From Ezra, looks like Grist has put together the guide that many of us have been dying for: How to Talk to a Climate Skeptic. I do hate to see the word “skeptic” used here, though, because the word implies a person who approaches issues critically instead of swallowing claims whole-heartedly, which is the exact opposite of what global warming denialists do. If anything, I’d say a person who doesn’t “believe” in global warming is an anti-skeptic, someone who sucks down right wing propaganda about the issue while doing everything in his power not to allow facts or reasoning to penetrate his thoughts and cause him to think that maybe, just maybe, it might not be wise for people to keep blowing an endless stream of atmosphere-clogging chemicals into the air.
Reading the thing is kind of depressing. On one hand, it’s good that it’s so thorough, but on the other, the number of straws-to-be-clung-to that they chronicle bewilders. People really, really don’t want to accept global warming and will say anything to convince themselves that it’s not real. When you read it, first you’ll be struck by how many dodges they’ve described here, and then probably be depressed when you realize that you’ve heard every single of these. Or, to be fair, that’s how I felt, but I imagine that’s a fairly standard reality-based reaction.
What I especially like is how many of the dodges contradict each other, but as I’ve noted before, when you’re arguing with someone who wants to deny global warming, they’ll usually throw the contradictions out at you and won’t even grasp that you can either believe that it’s not real or it’s not a big deal, but you can’t believe both at once.
They’ve got the pseudo-skeptical protests against global warming arranged by different taxonomies. I like the last one, Levels of Sophistication. You got to have a sense of humor about it, since it’s often all we have left. So, happy hunting. Just don’t get too frustrated if people you’re arguing with about this continue to believe that there’s no/no problem with global warming, even after you’ve shut down all their shallow, ridiculous arguments. The so-called skepticism about global warming puts the wishful thinking of the “schools in Iraq makes everything all better” crowd to shame.
Via.
If you’re in the mood for new ideas/creative thinking, check out Since Sliced Bread.
Werebear, subbing at Steve Gilliard’s, has a post up about an issue that I’ve long wondered about—having things delivered vs. going to the store to buy them yourself. Since I live a in a city that’s got basically everything I’d pretty much want to buy at a short drive or bike ride, I tend not to think on the issue much as one of striking back at encroaching monopoly, but I have wondered about the environmental impact of delivery vs. the impact of everyone driving to the store. Werebear seems optimistic that delivery is the better option, environmentally speaking.
Living as we do, in the back of beyond, what most people consider “shopping” is more than an hour away. So if I can’t get it locally, I find what we want online, and let it arrive via a Big Brown Truck which is coming to town anyway. There’s the key to a vast energy saving solution.
Bring back delivery.
When you look at how many things used to be delivered, you realize just how much companies have outsourced what used to be a part of their service. Instead of one truck from each store going around, dropping off the milk, the produce, all the myriad things we need every day, the stores have persuaded us, all of us, thousands of us, to get in our cars and go out and get it.
He never states it directly, but the implication is there. So I have to wonder out loud, is it really more environmental to have your purchases delivered? On hand, at each individual grocery store, you have thousands of people getting in their car and driving there, and like Werebear says, driving around the parking lot to get that much closer to the front of the store lest they expend precious and rare calories walking that much further in the parking lot. Remember, that extra step you take might be the one that helps unclog your arteries, so you don’t want that. To boot, a lot of those people are driving unnecessarily huge suburban assault vehicles that get 10 mpg.
Still, I remain unconvinced that a delivery truck, which probably gets even worse mileage than your Hummer and pollutes more, would be cleaner delivering to all those people than having them get it themselves. Granted, delivery drivers can create routes that half the amount of time on the road per delivery than the people shopping would spend, but that probably doesn’t make up for the filthiness and inefficiency of delivery trucks. In bigger cities where you’re never going to drive over 25 mph anyway, some of this could be mediated by having delivery to various homes off the back of electric trucks, though, and if I were a place like Whole Foods, I’d totally get on that to push up my green image.
Now, this guy I’d trust to tell me about global warming…
George Will’s column today is called “Fuzzy Climate Math“, and it’s hard to tell whether he’s referring to himself or to those he’s criticizing. This, especially, jumped right out at me:
Bjorn Lomborg, author of “The Skeptical Environmentalist”…says: Compliance with Kyoto would reduce global warming by an amount too small to measure. But the cost of compliance just to the United States would be higher than the cost of providing the entire world with clean drinking water and sanitation, which would prevent 2 million deaths (from diseases such as infant diarrhea) a year and prevent half a billion people from becoming seriously ill each year.
Ah, Bjorn Lomborg. Climate scientist extraordinaire. Except, of course, he’s an adjunct business professor. That link, to a comprehensive list of Lomborg’s errors, contains this gem of a quote from Peter H. Gleick:
“Waldo is a popular cartoon character with a funny hat, glasses, and a distinctive red and white shirt. Tiny images of Waldo are carefully hidden in large pieces of colorful artwork with hundreds or thousands of small cartoon figures in complex cartoon landscapes. The goal is to find Waldo. Kids spend hours poring over these pages looking for the hidden image. In The Skeptical Environmentalist, “Waldo” became a series of conceptual errors, misunderstandings, and data problems. As I turned each page, the surprise was which Waldo (or Waldos) I would find next. There was no shortage. Some were trivial; others were dramatic in their scope and implication.”
Lomborg is a man who once said (in German): “The fact that I knew the conclusion already when I started to write the book may have influenced many of the things that I wrote.” May have.
May have.
Picture via Greenpeace/The Price of Oil.
I think one thing it would be helpful to keep in mind is… to get to you, they come through us first. Whether it is laws building up to something like the Patriot Act, or undermining the holy grail of abortion rights, there are usually many steps taken that initially primarily affect poorer people and people of color, but which are eventually felt in some way by the overall population.–Nanette, in the comments to this thread.
This doesn’t just apply to discrimination and Draconian legislation. It also applies to human-influenced natural disasters and climate change. The poorest of the population are the most vulnerable to the effects of climate change. They are already paying the price. They feel the effects first, then we will.
A second post for tonight to make up for my lazy ass posting below, though this post is also lazy, as promised. I’m weirdly tired. From Lindsay, I found this article about how some upscale restaurants in more liberal areas, notably Chez Panisse in Berkeley, are giving up bottled water and going to filtered tap water for environmental reasons. Demonstrating how crabby I am, I’m inclined to wonder if this gesture is relatively empty, a feel-good measure that doesn’t really make a real difference. Of course, that’s what the water bottlers are saying, so maybe my grumpiness is misplaced.
Mostly this is an excuse, however, to post something by Penn and Teller. I was all excited about linking the video of the stunt they did on their show where they poured tap water for a bunch of people and convinced them it was expensive bottled water and asked them to compare the different waters. People managed to convince themselves that each glass of water tasted differently from the last, though it was all from the same tap. Unfortunately, YouTube doesn’t have the video up.
In lieu of that, Penn and Teller will make fun of the Bible for you.
I want 6,500 no-show jobs. We’ll call it the State Department.
Can protect the environment, that is.
The 5-4 decision said carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases emitted from tailpipes are “air pollutants'’ covered by the Clean Air Act of 1970 — rebuffing the Environmental Agency’s view that it lacked authority to regulate those emissions. And though the court stopped short of ordering the EPA to set mandatory limits, the justices rejected the Bush administration’s claim that voluntary programs were an effective substitute.
“Under the clear terms of the Clean Air Act, EPA can avoid taking further action only if it determines that greenhouse gases do not contribute to climate change or if it provides some reasonable explanation as to why it cannot or will not exercise its discretion to determine whether they do,'’ said Justice John Paul Stevens in the majority opinion.
“Can avoid taking further action?” EPA wants to avoid taking action? Apparently, EPA is the federal employee equivalent of a gut course. Actually, that makes sense: Where is an Earth Science* major more likely to end up than EPA?
Well, Interior, I suppose:
H. Dale Hall, director of the Fish and Wildlife Service, recounted a battle he had with [Julie A.] MacDonald over the Southwest willow flycatcher, an endangered bird. Biologists in the field concluded that the bird’s nesting range, which determines how much land the government should protect as habitat for the species, was 2.1 miles. Mr. Hall claims that Ms. MacDonald insisted on lowering that to 1.8 miles so that the nesting range would not extend into California, where her husband maintained a family ranch.
The inspector general’s review of Ms. MacDonald’s e-mail account also showed that she had close ties to lobbying organizations that have challenged endangered-species listings and that she had “misused her position” to give them information not available to the public on Interior Department policy.
Republicans hate big government? Wrong. They love big government. They want to take it home to mother and make it mix tapes. The problem with big government, for Republicans, is that there’s so much governing involved. Grover Norquist isn’t a radical libertarian, he’s just lazy.
EPA’s trying to get its workload lightened; Interior’s trying to get the lobbyists to do their homework. Defense outsources everything from KP to on-the-ground leadership. What’s next? Veterans Affairs…you know what, never mind.
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* Laugh at yourselves! You can do it! Just don’t be mad, because you probably have more rocks to throw than I do.
When I talked about how the system of global feudalism is so huge, and how it destroys people, I got a lot of strong reactions. While a lot of commenters got what I was saying, a lot didn’t. It either sounded to them like I was going to pillory them for shopping at Wal-Mart, or trash them for not doing enough political action. Neither was true–what tends to stop up the works in this movement is the obsession with one or the other.
I’m a big fan of organizing and political action, myself, but I do think it’s helpful to keep ourselves appraised of where the things we buy come from, and at what cost. These small individual consumer choices won’t change the world, but it will help to keep us focused, and keep us mindful of what’s at stake. I also think it could go a long way toward eroding some of our sense of entitlement.
(more…)
In making the case that they can’t, Kathy Freston quotes last week’s UN report by the world’s leading climate scientists:
The livestock sector emerges as one of the top two or three most significant contributors to the most serious environmental problems, at every scale from local to global.
I’ve tried a number of times to go lacto-ovo with little success. Large doses of soy make me ill. I hate eggs. And I feel weak when I don’t consume a little beef or chicken now and again.
Over the years, I’ve settled on greatly reducing the amount of animal protein I consume by using beef, chicken, fish and the like as a condiment rather than the main ingredient in dishes. I buy organic whenever I can. But, I guess I should take more responsibility for my personal environmental footprint. We all should.
According to Grist, Al Gore’s home draws on green electricity.
People whining need to really suck a donkey cock if this is true. Green sources like wind farms aren’t going to catch on unless they can make money, and so spending a lot of money on green electric bills is hardly wasteful as it would be if you were using coal burning plants. I’m embarrassed I completely forgot that high electric bills don’t necessarily translate to high carbon pollution, and I should know better since I have been paying the extra money for wind farm electricity for years now. (Though at this point, I do believe wind farm bills might finally be even and soon to be lower in Austin.)
However, the problem of global warming is wayyy beyond the capability of personal virtue to solve.
For instance, there is no doubt in my mind global warming is a real phenomenon, but I still fly, blast the air con, take taxis etc. etc. Why? Because I am not a sucker. Why should I deny myself my comforts when everybody else is pumping out CO2 anyhow?
However, I am in favor of a carbon tax. Sure, I’ll be paying more for gas and other stuff, but so will everyone else. So, unlike unilaterally cutting my own output, my sacrifice might count for something in terms of my future well-being.
What I’ve seen Gore do very effectively is raising awareness about the issue of climate change and arguing that we should do something about it collectivelly. Not because we liberals are all secretly commies and love to do things collectively but because it is the only fair and effective way to cut aggregate carbon output.
The very notion that Gore is a hypocrite when the issue is something that has nothing to do with personal virtue and everything to do with collective action just goes to show how badly it fucks people up when religion and politics get intertwined. This also shows the profound difference between the right and the left’s version of when government interference is justified.
After years of being fed a steady diet of propaganda that says that everything from regulation on polluters to diplomacy is some sort of strike against freedom while also being asked to support a series of pointless laws meant to restrict pot smoking and birth control, wingnuts have grown accustomed to believing that the only legitimate government restraints on liberties are those that strike at behaviors that are suspect only because they bring pleasure to the unwashed masses. As such, they view the necessary restrictions on carbon use as some sort of moral crusade against sins they personally like to indulge and so they grasp at the “hypocrite” slander, as if that meant something.
The thing is, global warming isn’t a punishment enacted on us by a vengeful god for disobeying his dictates. This isn’t like pointing to the sexual behavior of Ted Haggard and arguing that he doesn’t even buy into his own nonsense. When liberals point to Haggard’s hypocrisy, our point is that the strictures on the behavior don’t make sense. Gay men’s suffering would disappear if the social disdain for homosexuality did. The thing is with global warming, we have the opposite problem. If society doesn’t do anything, it will get worse.
If Al Gore isn’t doing his part to reduce his carbon emissions, well, the word hypocrite hardly applies. (Noteworthy: Looks like this group that released this report is yet another right wing think tank. Al Gore might be “wasteful” the same way I hate Catholics, which is to say not at all) Making environmentalism a modern day version of puritanical abstention doesn’t do much to actually help the planet. Carbon taxes would make a difference. Gore should probably do more personally if his bills are indeed that high, but on the whole, it’s hardly relevant compared to the huge amount of work that he’s done advocating for a collective response. Calling Ted Haggard a hypocrite dramatically undermines his message, because his belief that being gay is wrong is based strictly on religious faith. Calling Al Gore a hypocrite and deciding this excuses your SUV-driving doesn’t change the facts; the planet will still fry even as your conscience is clear because you called Gore a hypocrite. Even if Al Gore were the highest carbon emitter on the planet, this would not change the truth about global warming one bit.
I’m not immune to feeling personal guilt over behavior that doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. I’m feeling under the weather one day and drive to the store instead of bicycle, I’ll feel guilty and then angry because there’s no way what I do matters when there’s no way what I do will matter since the vast majority of people don’t even try. And then I can’t really get mad at them, because they’re just doing what seems to be the best. The only real solution is to make the best choices for people to be the green choices, and nit picking as if we’re talking about silly hypocrisies like the ones the virtue warriors on the right engage in isn’t giving the importance of global warming its proper weight.
The science may not be sound, but it’s quite glamorous.
Scientists say that the administration tried to pressure them into downplaying climate change. This shouldn’t be a surprise, given the history of this administration. However, it’s obvious that this is like, totally not the case, since everyone knows that climate change is controversial and very disputed. I mean, it’s only the actual climatologists in every major scientific organization in the world that buys into it.
Thankfully, the good rational intellectuals over at the Heartland Institute has a real problem with this, and is skeptical. By “skeptical” I mean, “unwilling to acknowledge reality at all.” They claim that “experts” question the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which says that yes, climate change is real and OMG IT’S HAPPENING RIGHT NOW HOLY CRAP PEOPLE. We all know that there is no such thing as global warming, but even if there is, there could be benefits. At least so says the economist who wrote the thing. And he’s qualified to debunk experts in the field because he saw something about it on PBS one day. Or something.
But fear not! We have the solution! My fellow Americans, we can create giant space mirrors to block out the sun!
Well, Gerald Ford’s death has tacked one more day on my vacation. *inappropriate internet expression of joy*
From what I understand, and correct me if I’m wrong, one of the big stages of child development is the toddler years, when children first really begin to grasp the concept that they are separate individuals from their parents and that their parents existed before them and were even children once themselves. That one has to learn this, and that it’s a struggle to comprehend, says a lot about human nature. When I look at creationists, I see a group of people who haven’t moved past the toddler stage in comprehending their relationship to the planet.* Knowing that the earth was here long before us and has a whole history that has nothing to do with us is an important step in the development of the human race, and the creationists are throwing a huge temper tantrum and refusing to face up to reality.
The latest squalling in the temper tantrum is over putting this stupid book that argues that the Grand Canyon is only 6,000 years old into the National Park Service bookstore at the Grand Canyon. In response, Chris has created a reality-based timeline of the canyon that is heavy with reminders of how much older the canyon is than humanity itself, the sort of thing that maximizes the mental stress on creationists—”No, it can’t be true that Mother Earth had a life before me! Wah!”
That all said, the fact that we’re in a big political fight over this issue really draws attention to the fact that evolutionary theory and the realization that the world is ancient beyond our comprehension does have a profound effect on philosophy and our own views of ourselves and our place in the world. It’s important to honor this truth when fighting with creationists, if only because you are in danger of underestimating their strength of conviction if you underestimate the psychological distress the theory puts on them. Off the top of my head, here are the major philosophical implications if you are willing to accept the truth about evolution and how old the planet is.**
The planet has a life and history separate from ours. The knowledge that the Grand Canyon has been carved out slowly over millions of years is a lot more dramatic a realization than the troubling toddler realization that Mommy was a child herself once. Just as we have to accept that Mommy is a human being in her own right and not just a source of food and comfort, we have to respect that the planet has an existence of its own. That respect brings with it a sense of duty towards the planet, even if conservatives would deny it. The realization that Mommy had a life before you makes it a lot harder to be ceaselessly demanding of Mommy, because now you understand that she is more than your support system. Same with the planet.
We are just another species of animal. The animal rights implications of this realization aside, the main implication of this is that we aren’t so special. For millenia, religious and philosophical thinkers have tried to demonstrate that we are significantly different from animals in such a way that it proves that god made us in his image, and they’ve not done the best job of it, because people keep, in ways big and small, accepting the truth of their own eyes, which is that animals are not different from us in any major way. We keep pets, we try to treat farm animals decently, if we torture animals to eat them, we have that out of sight so we don’t have to live with the implications. There’s no pretty stories about how that cow you’re eating is going to be up in heaven waiting to talk it over with you when you get there. It’s not hard to extrapolate that if cows don’t go to heaven, and we’re animals just like cows, then we’re probably going to just be dead meat one day, too. Creationism is part of the denial of death.
Change is not only possible, but it’s impossible for things not to always be changing. This is why creationism is such a conservative movement, I think. More than anything, the story of Genesis has the underlying theme of futility to it—things are just the way they are because someone ate an apple once, and you’d be foolish to change things. The dynamic nature of evolution suggests another theme, which is not only have we evolved to this point, but that we are still evolving. Biological determinists try to recreate the futility of progressive action that creationism implied, but that’s just a lesser version of the same temper tantrum. On the whole, the popular notion that we were once monkeys that got smarter means that we can be monkeys that keep getting smarter.
As a feminist, the big implication that jumps out at me is that the story of Genesis that justifies the gender hierarchy is out the door. Because men have traditionally had power over women only matters if you think that change is not possible. But we grew big brains, we started walking upright, we invented agriculture—surely we can make women’s equality possible. If you think about it, it’s no coincidence at all that creationists also tend to be socially conservative, which means of course that they are pro-patriarchy. It all fits together.
*And in a different way, anti-choicers have the same issue, in that they can’t understand that a pregnant woman is a separate being from the potential child.
**We are all Devo! (Sorry.)
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Mary at Pacific Views has a couple of posts about the state of the enviornment and the state of our food in 2006. I’m going to share in her prediction that we’re going to see more interest in food issues and in global warming in 2007. The latter is an area where I fear we may not be moving fast enough to stop the damage, since we have the huge roadblock of two more years of BushCo, and BushCo would pretty much rather burn the planet to the ground rather than cut into oil profits, so there you go. Still, people are beginning to get scared and I think any Democrat who wants to run for President needs to put global warming at the top of his priority list.
On the food front, I agree with Mary that 2006 was a turning point, particularly the E. coli spinach scare. Americans have a very moralistic attitude about food, and so scares about mad cow disease and E. coli in meat tend to be pushed aside precisely because Americans have it in their head that beef is a decadent sin, so naturally there are random punishments for eating it. If you are at all familiar with people’s ambivalence about abortion rights, then I think you can see how those same feelings are kicked up when it comes to beef-eating. But spinach is holy food. An E. coli scare about spinach is like finding out you can get pregnant from sitting in church pews. It reorders the situation considerably.
Mary has more information about why E. coli is a growing problem, and most of it stems from the existence of factory farming—the Rolling Stone has an article about what an ecological nightmare factory farming of pigs is. In summary: there is no reason on god’s green earth that pig shit lagoons need to exist. Pig farming, as I’ve mentioned before, depresses me more than almost any other animal cruelty issue, because pigs are so intelligent and social that their suffering in factory farms leads to an animal form of insanity. But even for you heartless bastards who can’t care about an animal’s pain, the ecological issues should give you pause. Pig shit is particularly odious and toxic—even on traditional pig farms, where pigs get to run around, managing pig shit is a hell of a task. So imagine the issues of an extreme amount of pig shit being created in one small area.
Hogs produce three times the fecal waste as humans, yet hog farms are not required to provide sewage treatment for hog waste. What normally happens is the hog waste is stored in huge ponds known as lagoons. At certain times the liquid from the lagoons is sprayed on the fields creating a toxic (bacterial laden) manure. Often the lagoons leak or overflow poisoning the groundwater and the streams. Now we have dead zones in the rivers and oceans that are downstream from factory farms.
Truly, these pig shit lagoons are like a standing symbol of the excesses of capitalism. From the Rolling Stone article:
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In 1992, when a worker making repairs to a lagoon in Minnesota began to choke to death on the fumes, another worker dived in after him, and they died the same death. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.
The weird thing about all this is that factory hog farming would be wiped out if the government started imposing basic health restrictions on them. Which the government needs to do. If the only way to turn a profit raising pigs was in a small farm situation, everyone wins. The pigs won’t be tortured, the lagoons of shit would disappear, spinach wouldn’t have E. coli on it, small farmers would have a livelihood again, and the meat itself would taste better and be better for you. The price of pork would go up, but it’s not the worst thing in the world if people ate least artery-clogging meat. Literally, the only people that benefit from the current situation are the Big Agra pig farmers, and fuck those environment-destroying animal torturers.
Anyway, I’m digressing from my predictions. My main point is that I am pleased with the growing interest people are taking in finding out the horrible truth about the state of American agriculture. The Omnivore’s Dilemma selling so well and getting so much publicity is a good sign, as is the movie version of Fast Food Nation, and of course, the spinach scare is just bizarre and out-of-place enough that it really cut through people’s fog of ignorance and made them really think about where their food is coming from. But since lagoons of pig shit aren’t going anywhere soon, we can expect more vegetable scares like that one. In a weird way, the huge overreaction to the spinach scare that caused most of it to disappear from the market for weeks actually may end up backfiring on the very Big Agra protectionists who definitely wouldn’t do that if it was beef that showed up with E. coli in it like that. If you eat spinach at all, you couldn’t help but notice the recall, since it was so huge. People are going to start really asking some hard questions.
The other good sign I see in that area is the growing interest in being a “foodie”. Seriously, chefs from the Food Network are big fucking stars, chi-chi grocery stores like Whole Foods and Central Market (which I like a million times more than Whole Foods, by the way) are popping up everywhere, and it seems to me that there’s like 3 times as many magazines that specialize in gourmet cooking than there was a few years ago. Sure, it’s a middle class trend, but that doesn’t mean it’s not an important trend. What is pleasing about it is that sustainable and organic farming methods simply produce tastier food, so even if people didn’t have environmental or health concerns, the foodie trend would still be driving the increase in interest in eating those foods. At the grocery store this weekend, I took stock of how many organic products are on the shelves at boring old HEB that weren’t there a year ago—organic wine, organic chocolate truffles, organic cheeses—and on a lot of them, the price is coming down as the popularity and subsequently the supply goes up. The price of organic bananas came down to about half what it was a month ago, for instance, and banana prices are usually pretty stable. A couple of years ago, if I wanted everything I ate to be organic, I would have had to go to Central Market to buy it, but now I can just jog to the regular HEB. In Austin, at least, the popularity of the farmers’ markets is skyrocketing—seems to be more people out there all the time, even when it’s cold, like it was Saturday morning. The other thing I’ve noticed lately at the farmers’ market is that it is seeming more market-like all the time. People are friendlier, actual haggling is beginning to pop up, and there’s a definite uptick in the diversity of ages and races. Now, if only they would make the folk musicians go away, it would be perfect.
So this is my optimistic prediction for 2007—we’re going to see more of the same, more people asking hard questions, more people deciding to move their food dollars to more responsibly harvested crops, and hopefully the numbers will reach the tipping point where real political power starts coming into play.
And here’s a good interview with Michael Pollan explaining even more of the issues.