I missed this when it first came around I guess. It raises the question – how can Americans vote for someone as stupid as John Boehner, leaving aside the question of how the Republican Party make him the House Minority Leader?
– Carbon dioxide is a carcinogen? Huh? It’s a greenhouse gas John.
– CO2 from cows is a problem? Huh? It’s the methane John.
– When cows “do what they do” that’s a problem? Not that John can’t name it because he wants to use the word fart, but it’s not cow farts, it’s cow burps that are the issue. But since Boehner doesn’t know that….

Is he capable of getting a single fact right?

BTW, I don’t write here much anymore. When I have some short and outstandingly insightful (or stupid) remark to make, I make it on Twitter these days. Most of what I have to say, I’ve learned, can be said as well in 140 characters.

Popularity: 19% [?]

Scientific American has a great podcast, especially for those of us who believe in whacky theories like evolution, climate change and gravity. Tom Friedman has some great perspectives on why dealing with climate change is a good bet, even if the theory is wrong. To the doubters, he argues that our national security depends on a renewable energy source which, whoops, is what solving the climate change issue requires too.

Listen HERE.

Takeway quote: “Change your leaders, not your lightbulbs.”

Also, the interview with Jerry Coyne on evolution and creationism is worth a listen.

Popularity: 19% [?]

I think this is the third installment of the Ranter Index. It could be #4 though.

• 340,000: barrels of oil burned by the US military per day [1].
• 0.2: grams of CO2 produced by each Google search [3].
• 140: grams of CO2 produced by traveling one kilometer in a car that meets latest EU emission standards [3].
• 36: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 1976 [2].
• 131: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 1993 before legislation requiring CEO salaries of public companies to be published [2].
• 369: average CEO pay as a multiple of average worker’s pay in 2008, 15 years after the legislation to correct the “problem” [2].
• 525 million: total cost in dollars of all robberies in the US in 2004 [2].
• 16 billion: total cost in dollars of all robbery, larceny-theft, and automobile theft in the US in 2004 [2].
• 24 billion: total cost in dollars of bogus insurance claims in the US in 2004 [2].
• 350 billion: total cost in dollars estimated by the IRS of underreporting on taxes in the US [2].
• 600 billion: total cost in dollars of employee theft and fraud in the workplace [2].

Sources:

• 1. “Rubber Tracks Make Military Vehicles More Efficient, Durable, Quieter”, Treehugger, Dec 15, 2008.
• 2. Dan Ariely, Predictably Irrational, pp. 17, 195–96.
• 3. Powering a Google search, Official Google Blog, Jan. 11, 2009. These figures from Google are in response to an article in the Sunday Times (London) which said that it took 7gms per search and cited research of Harvard physicist Alex Wissner-Gross. Unfortunately for the Times, Wissner-Gross emphatically states that he never even studied Google but did calculate that every second one spends online generates 200 milligrams of CO2, but that’s total for all aspects included and doesn’t consider search specifically. Wissner-Gross runs the CO2 Stats website

Popularity: 17% [?]

I always hear people say that passenger rail in America should not get subsidies and that if it can’t sustain itself in the open market, it shouldn’t exist. Actually, I could agree with that — if the playing field were even and automobile and truck traffic weren’t so heavily subsidized. So here are a few little figures to contribute to that debate:

• 60: percentage of the 53.3 billion dollars the government spends each year that is covered by gasoline taxes and fees and vehicle registration fees.
• 60: percentage of costs on Amtrack covered by passenger fees according to a 1997 Cato Institute study.
• 14: percentage of damage caused by trucks paid for by the taxes and fees on trucks.
• 150,000: miles of railroad track in the US currently (approx).
• 429,883: miles of railroad track in the US in 1930.

How many miles of track might we have today and what might the relative ticket prices be if our streets and highways were not so heavily subsidized? Or what level of subsidy is appropriate for maintaining infrastructure? Those are open questions, but let’s not pretend that passenger rail subsidies are abnormal and some supposedly free-market highways system is normal.

Sources:

• “America in Motion,” Lorraine Moffa and Nigel Holmes, American History, vol. 43, n. 6 (Feb 2009), pp. 42–43.
• “Amtrack Subsidies:This is no Way to Run a Railroad,” Stephen Moore, on Cato.org

Popularity: 9% [?]

I think the headline is a bit overblown, but this is pretty cool – wind generators that don’t turn (cheap and no dead birds), pedal-power charged batteries and more from Discover Magazine

Popularity: 9% [?]

We all know by now that plastic bottles are filling landfills and supposedly drinking bottled water is evil. Of course, drinking Odwalla juices is merely outrageously expensive instead of evil, for reasons that have more to do with perceptions of evil than with the differences between a juice bottle and a water bottle. And of course, we know that a bottle of water, when production and transport and disposal are counted, uses roughly enough petroleum to fill that bottle a quarter of the way to the top (and a bottle of juice?). And finally, we know that the real looming crisis in America (and Australia and many other developed yet arid parts of the world) is not so much energy, but running out of water. So if all that’s old news, what’s the new news? The new news is that Elizabeth Royte has written an entire book about bottled water. If Bottlemania: How Water Went on Sale and Why We Bought It is as good as the New York Times review of it, it’s probably a surprisingly interesting read.

Popularity: 15% [?]

How many times have we seen this?

I love this picture by Stephen de Sousa which has been going around to BlogTO and Treehugger (where I found it).

Popularity: 15% [?]

The last couple of days, I’ve been listening to the radio and there has been a lot of reporting on the space shuttle taking a module to the space station: the launch, the arrival of the astronauts, the mission. Every time I hear something like this, I feel cheated. In 1969, when I was six years old and Neil Armstrong made one small step for man, one giant step for mankind, it seemed pretty obvious that we would all be visiting the Moon for vacation by the year 2000. Arthur C. Clarke, the author of Space Odyssey: 2001, said a few years back when we landed the rover on Mars that, back in 1969, he would never have believed that in 2001 we would land a toaster-sized unmanned rover on Mars and consider it a technological and scientific triumph.
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Popularity: 14% [?]

Eighteen dollars per gallon and rising? Could it be that something that bad for the environment is also that expensive? Yep, that’s right baby! That’s what you’ll be paying for water if you drink out of plastic bottles. (more…)

Popularity: 8% [?]

First some facts. Paper production is the second-largest use of fresh water in the world (presumably after agriculture). Paper production accounts for 11% of all fresh water used. Paper production is the single largest contributor to cutting forest and makes up a huge portion of the volume poured into our landfills. Changing to narrower margins, using .75” instead of 1” as the default, results on average in a savings of 4.7%. In 2004, when Americans used eight billion tons of paper, changing to narrower margins would save 380,000 tons of paper (yes, that’s a lot less than 4.7% but there are many uses of paper that are not affected by changing the margins, such as grocery bags).
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Popularity: 10% [?]