Greg Craven argues that we should “choose columns” rather than “guess rows” when thinking through global climate change:
This lecture seems to amount to a “Pascal’s Wager” of GCC.
I was recently chatting with a friend who has been a Scientologist for several decades. He was attacking the White House for its conspiracy with other networks to censor and muzzle Fox News. He later sent me this screed on the Campaign for Liberty blog under the Subject “Fox News is Right”. The CfL is one of the political arms of Scientology. Check out their mission and board if you want. The introduction to the post is (in part, go read it yourself):
Why is America under such a vicious and prolonged [internal] attack against its basic beliefs? Why are some Americans attacking the hand that feeds them? Why tear down a working system? None of the attacks make sense. It is as though we are living in a looking glass world. I am looking backwards and it seems left is right and wrong is right and right is wrong. Politically correct speak replaced plain speak and the silent Christian majority are called domestic terrorists.
Okay, I paused at this point and replied (in part):
Lost me at “silent Christian majority”. An iconic building in every neighborhood, billboards every mile, ads every hour on radio and TV channels not already owned outright by Christian networks, and their creed printed on money and embedded in children’s daily oath to the flag does not fit my definition of “silent”.
I didn’t mention the wholesome Christian activities of blockading health clinics, continuous protests with gory signs on streets and campuses, bombing clinics and shooting doctors.
But the actual point of the article is that the KGB is alive and well and still trying to take over America via a conspiracy with the Psychiatric Industrial Complex. They have (the article claims) powerful mind control methods that are being used on the public.
If so, I asked in reply, how did we ever manage to get rid of CheneyBush?
Today, my friend sent me (among other Scientology political pieces) a YouTube video attacking Obama’s plan to sign the latest international emissions control treaty. It took a while of watching to figure this out, among the doomsayer speech of One World Government, global warming denialism, and the demise of America and such. Many of the positive comments to the video seem to be from garden variety End Days Christians, but the platform is quite visibly Scientology.
The point of all this is, Why are the Scientologists aligning with Fox and Christian Fundamentalists? For recruitment? For political palatability? To hijack a powerful propaganda machine?
Read and listen to what they actually say, and get back to me.
The twelve countries with the highest quality of life do not include the United States. We come in at number 13, which means that we”re not doing badly as a whole. But we’re not doing as well as we should be doing, assuming (as many conservatives insist without reference to any metric) that there is no greater country than the United States. We were beaten in the rankings by many “socialist” countries, such as Norway, Canada, Sweden and France.
The U.N.’s measurement system is the Human Development Index, a complex objective formula, not a subjective determination. Some of the many dozens of factors that go into the HDI include the following:
Consider, also, this recent news from the Commonwealth Fund:
Although the United States now spends $2.4 trillion a year on medical care — vastly more per capita than comparable countries — the nation ranks near the bottom on premature deaths caused by illnesses such as diabetes, epilepsy, stroke, influenza, ulcers and pneumonia
Bill Maher is distressed about America’s lack of capacity to do good things and stop doing bad things. Our mechanism for meaningful change is completely broken.
Well, I hate to be a nudge, but why has America become a nation that can’t make anything bad end, like wars, farm subsidies, our oil addiction, the drug war, useless weapons programs - oh, and there’s still 60,000 troops in Germany - and can’t make anything good start, like health care reform, immigration reform, rebuilding infrastructure. Even when we address something, the plan can never start until years down the road. Congress’s climate change bill mandates a 17% cut in greenhouse gas emissions… by 2020! Fellas, slow down, where’s the fire? Oh yeah, it’s where I live, engulfing the entire western part of the United States! We might pass new mileage standards, but even if we do, they wouldn’t start until 2016.
What do we need?
a) leaders with balls, and b) a general populace who can think again. Barack Obama has said, “If we were starting from scratch, then a single-payer system would probably make sense.” So let’s start from scratch.
I find Bill Maher to be especially insightful–he cuts right through the BS over and over. This particular article by Maher was especially well written.
According to Witold Rybczynski (writing in The Atlantic), it’s time to get serious about living sustainably. Currently, we do that by going out to buy the latest and greatest gadgets for saving energy. There’s a much better foundation for accomplishing this goal of living sustainably:
The problem in the sustainability campaign is that a basic truth has been lost, or at least concealed. Rather than trying to change behavior to actually reduce carbon emissions, politicians and entrepreneurs have sold greening to the public as a kind of accessorizing. Keep doing what you’re doing, goes the message. Just add a solar panel, a wind turbine, a hybrid engine, whatever. But a solar-heated house in the burbs is still a house in the burbs, and if you have to drive to it, even in a Prius, it’s hardly green.
Instead of putting little Band-Aids on the big problem, Rybczynski argues that we ought to move back to the city. We would save much more energy by prohibiting spread-out low-rise buildings than by pasting solar panels on them. “A reasonably well-built and well insulated multifamily building is inherently more sustainable than a detached house.” He advocates three or four story “walk-ups,” which don’t require elevators. These can create sufficient density “about 50 people per acre, to support public transit, walk ability and other urban amenities.”
Another important approach is to focus on the way we construct our commercial buildings. When we combine residences with commercial and institutional structures, buildings consume 48% of our energy, more than any other sector.
The debate over tap water vs. bottled water will probably go on for quite some time. Many people believe that by purchasing bottled water, they are consuming better quality water than that which comes from the tap. Others argue that the environmental impact of bottled water is massive, and that bottled water is no safer than tap water. A report earlier this year from the Government Accounting Office claims that because public water supplies are regulated by the Safe Water Drinking Act and those regulations are enforced by the EPA, they are therefore safer than bottled water, which is regulated by the FDA– and we all know what a wonderful job the FDA has been doing. But a new investigative report by the New York Times calls this conclusion into question.
In the last five years alone, chemical factories, manufacturing plants and other workplaces have violated water pollution laws more than half a million times. The violations range from failing to report emissions to dumping toxins at concentrations regulators say might contribute to cancer, birth defects and other illnesses.
However, the vast majority of those polluters have escaped punishment. State officials have repeatedly ignored obvious illegal dumping, and the Environmental Protection Agency, which can prosecute polluters when states fail to act, has often declined to intervene.
Media Education Foundation has released a new documentary called “Blind Spot” which
explores the inextricable link between the energy we use, the way we run our economy, and the multiplying threats that now confront the environmental health and stability of our planet. Taking as its starting point the inevitable energy depletion scenario known as “Peak Oil,” the film surveys a fascinating range of the latest intellectual, political, and scientific thought to make the case that by whatever measure of greed, wishful thinking, neglect, or ignorance, we now find ourselves at a disturbing crossroads: we can continue to burn fossil fuels and witness the collapse of our ecology, or we can choose not to and witness the collapse of our economy. Refusing to whitewash this reality, Blind Spot issues a call to action, urging us to face up to the perilous situation we now find ourselves in so that we might begin to envision a realistic, if inconvenient, way out.
You can watch a ten-minute excerpt here. By watching it, I learned that:
See the related posts for more information on peak oil, as well as here and here.
Today I took my two daughters to a movie. The theater was located in a large suburban shopping mall in Southwest St. Louis County, “Crestwood Plaza.” I had not been to this mall for several years, and I was shocked at what I saw. Approximately 40% of the stores have been shuttered and the entire place was like a ghost town. A lonely security guard told me that the stores have been rapidly failing over the past two years. That comports with my recollection. Two years ago, this mall was a packed and thriving shopping area located in a solidly middle-class community. Crestwood Plaza is not an isolated story; shopping malls are failing all across America.
[I've posted a gallery of today's images many of these shuttered stores along with this post. If you don't see that gallery, click the title to this post to go to the permalink, where you will see those thumbnails.]
I sometimes get snarkish when someone tells me they’re going to a shopping mall. I sometimes ask the Intrepid shopper to do me a favor and buy something practical for me, “Could you please buy me a hammer.” I usually get the same reaction, a puzzled look accompanied by a response “They don’t sell practical things like hammers at shopping malls.” Now I’m not denying that malls sell clothes or that we need clothes. Most mall clothes are for far more than staying warm or covering up. They are much more often than not, for impressing others.
For that reason, I’m not shedding tears for the shattering of dozens of mall stores at Crestwood Plaza or anywhere else. The failure of most of the stores means that we won’t be buying things we don’t actually need. Because Hallmark no longer sells its commercial greeting cards, we might be “forced” to create and send our own personalized cards and letters to each other. Now that Libby Lu gone, our pre-teen daughters can get back to being children rather than obsessing about their sex appeal. In my mind, many of these store closings are mostly good things, although I am saddened by the thought that so many people have lost their jobs due to these shutdowns. See these terrific videos by Josh Golin of CCFC regarding the dangers of turning our children into rampant consumers.
Another silver lining is that the mall owners have been forced to do something different with their space in order to survive (assuming they do survive). What they’ve done at Crestwood Plaza is to lease out many of the “store” spaces to art galleries, educational facilities, community theaters and other arts and crafts workshops for children and adults. In other words, it appears that the mall owners are opening up their malls for people who want to develop their minds and skill-sets rather than simply their pocketbooks.
Would you like to save energy around your house. This is the most comprehensive list I’ve seen. I found this link on the site of Rocky Mountain Institute, and the list is cross-categorized in several helpful ways.
BTW, have you seen a gradual shift in the media coverage regarding “peak oil“? Though this term (”peak oil”) is still avoided, I’ve seen many articles and many sources that are now acknowledging that we are in the twilight of the age of oil. Yet go back 5 years, and the thought that we were running out of reasonably priced oil in our lifetimes was mostly scoffed at. I think we have entered the age of resignation, without any official announcement.
“First they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win” — Mahatma Ghandi.
Last year, I reported on the 2008 Naked Bike Ride in St. Louis, the first ever in my home town. The official purposes are twofold: to protest dependency on oil and to celebrate our bodies. It’s also a blast riding through town without having to worry about motor vehicles and without having to wonder what one’s fellow travelers look like naked (or almost naked). 
This year’s St. Louis Naked Bike Ride occurred tonight, with perfect temperatures for not wearing much of anything or not wearing anything at all. I’d make a wild guess and say that there were about 1,000 bike riders tonight, 70% of them male. I’d also guess that about 20 of them were riding completely naked. I saw people from 16 to 70 years of age. Lots of camaraderie–the riders were warning each other of potholes and other road hazards. I only saw a few spills–luckily, those falls involved people with some clothing to protect them. 
The genius of this event’s marketing is that every local media outlet was out there reporting on the event. Imagine having a clothed bike ride to protest oil dependency. You would probably only have the attention of a few eccentric bloggers like me.
Speaking of which, I was there tonight (wearing boxers), riding a course that was modified (shortened to about 7 miles) at the last minute, apparently to avoid the outflow of a huge crowd from a Cardinal Baseball game downtown. We wouldn’t want those people to be embarrassed were we to ride by and see them dropping exorbitant amounts to amuse themselves–$50 for tickets and $7 for hot dogs. Not while we–the naked and almost naked riders–were out there protesting oil and admiring and celebrating each others’ nakedness, all for free.
I would like to point out that the aim of this bicycle ride to celebrate our bodies is not a trivial issue. Refusing to celebrate the human body is closely related to our refusal to consider that humans are animals. These two dyfunctions are the cause of constant needless and useless human suffering. See this earlier post on terror management theory and this post on the dysfunction that stems from our failure to accept that humans are animals.
For a gallery of about a dozen additional photos I took, click on the title to this post.
Stewart Brand was the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog. He’s been doing a lot of thinking over the years, and gave an update at TED.
He discussed the 1 Billion people living in squatter cities, soon to be 2 billion. There’s a lot of desperation and a lot of crime, but it’s not all bad news. There is a scale of efficiency about these cities. Talk about compactness! Go to the 6 minute mark of this video within a video and watch what happens immediately after the train goes by.
Brand suggest that coming to the city gives people hope that they will be better off financially, which inexorably brings down the birth rate.
He has nothing good to say about coal–it is the cause of the climate change we see. He has nothing bad to say about nuclear power; it is a “green” fuel. According to Brand, we can’t get rid of coal fast enough. We are going to be facing massive climate change, faster than we can imagine. This will cause many millions of “climate refugees” and ongoing “resource wars” such as the one in Darfur.
The situation in India has gone way beyond rationing. It truly is a nightmare, as reported by The Guardian.
At Salon.com, Stephanie Zacharek explains that cheap and plentiful goods are not a good idea. Her article is a review of a new book, “Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture,” by Ellen Ruppel Shell.
Here’s how Zacharek’s bottom line regarding Shell’s book:
The wealth of cheap goods available to us doesn’t make our lives better; instead, it fosters an environment that endangers not just the jobs of American workers but the idea of human labor, period.
It turns out that Shell is not only picking on Wal-Mart. She’s talking about those mass-farmed shrimp, as well as trendy stores like IKEA. “We no longer expect craftsmanship in everyday objects; maybe we don’t feel we even deserve it.”
