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.

Listen HERE.

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

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

• 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

• 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

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.

On the plus side, we have regained our future. When I was a kid, everyone looked 30 years ahead, hypothesizing about what the world would be like in 2000, usually choosing between a techno-utopia (think TV and film), an irradiated planet (think the novels of Philip K. Dick and the Civil Defense training in fifth grade), or perhaps a totalitarian society that seduced us with amusements and bribes (think Brave New World or Neil Postan’s Amusing Ourselves to Death).

I noticed in the 1990s, that everyone still talked about the world in 2000. It was at that point that I first realized that I had been cheated and that I was never going to get my own spaceship. In fact, as warnings about climate change grew, I realized they might even take away my gravity-bound car and perhaps my electron-consuming computer too. For the most part, though, climate change was barely on the radar and everyone talked about the Y2K global collapse that threatened (remember that?). It was then that I discovered the remarkable book by Stewart Brand (founder of the Whole Earth Catalog and early organizer of Earth Day), Clock of the Long Now. The book is about a project to build a clock that would go round once every 10,000 years. The project came out of an observation by Danny Hillis, one of the architects of the Cray Supercomputer. Hillis noticed, as I did, that over hsi entire life, the future always meant the year 2,000. He came up with the brilliant observation that for every year he had been alive, we had lost one year of future.

The Long Now project is an attempt to prompt people to think over the longer term. The clock is just the means to get people thinking, not important in and of itself. The book is a fascinating read on the problems and benefits of planning for the long term. For example,

• When they were doing a restoration of one of the colleges at Cambridge some years ago, they realized that they didn’t have oak beams big enough to replace the historic beams in the building. In searching the records, they realized that the builders had thought of that. The oak grove near the college had been planted specifically to replace the beams centuries later.
• In Sweden, the navy realized that they would eventually run out of trees big enough to make masts for giant ships. In the late eigtheenth century, they asked the royal forester to plant some trees for delivery in 200 years. In the 1980s, the forester contacted the navy to say that their trees were ready. Stewart Brand points out that the trees were useless to the navy, but the effort to preserve a disappearing resource had an unexpected payoff in that, though we now place a low value on giant trees for masts, we place a high value on old-growth forests.

It occurred to me recently that the growing awareness regarding climate change, however, may once again turn us into long-term thinkers. As the number of sceptics decreases, there will be an increasing tendency for people to project their actions further and further into the future. As a historian, I see this as a good thing. Now that climate change gets so much publicity, I think that the last few years are the first time in my life that I have seen the future extend out in front of me rather than retract. The inability to look over long distances into the past and the future prevents us from solving any major problem. So though for the time being the bad news continues to pile up with regard to climate change, the turn toward looking into the future and thinking about consequences is a first step to finding solutions.

Meanwhile, a billion bottles a day go into landfills or some obscene number like that. In addition, huge amounts of energy are spent shipping water from all over the globe. Can you believe that people will actually buy water from Fiji (one of the fastest growing “brands” of water) and France (Evian, Perrier) and then actually worry about recycling the bottle! For Christ’s sake, can’t they see that the environmental damage from shipping the water is the main thing.

Oh, and actually it isn’t the main thing. If the water is so-called “spring water”, that means that it has been exctracted from the ground just before it comes out of the spring (otherwise it’s well water or surface water). The way you prove that your water is spring water, is basically by impacting a spring enough to make is stop flowing. Now taking 1% of the flow out of a river does nothing, but taking 50% or 99% of the flow out of a spring basically is going to kill everything that used to live in that water shed. When are people going to stop this bullshit!

That said, I can’t help but think of it in terms of William McDonough’s work (see my review of Cradle to Cradle). McDonough, one of the most brilliant and innovative environmental thinkers, argues that environmentalists are overly focused on efficiency. Of course, all things being equal, efficiency is better than inefficiency, but McDonough says that making a fundamentally unsustainable and dangerous process 4.7% more efficient, still leaves us using 95.3% of the same inputs and creating 95.3% of the waste products. That makes me think that what we really need to do is rethink the paper-making process.

We may be a long way off from biofuels that are truly practical. As I’ve said before, fueling our cars and homes off corn-based ethanol is absolutely unsustainable. Paper production takes a fair bit of energy from transporting the wood, to pulping it, to running the massive high-temperature dryers that dry the almost-finished product, to delivering the paper to market. Recycling only helps so much there, and we have to hope that the energy inputs can eventually come from algae, switchgrass, willow and other such sources that scientists are working on. That technology is still some way off.

On the other hand, there is no technical reason whatsoever for paper production to be raping virgin forest. This is pure economics: the US Forest Service and similar institutions in the US and Canada make virgin too cheap with cheap leases and subsidized roadways (the US Forest Service operates the largest network of roads in the world). Meanwhile, farmland lies fallow and gets turned over to shopping malls in the Midwest. This land, however, could be turned over from fallow to cultivating fast-growing, high-pulp plants that could make paper. Kenaf produces enough pulp that it is estimated that 5,000 acres could keep a 200-ton/day paper mill supplied. An acre of kenaf produces roughly three to five times as much pulp in one season as an acre of forest does in 7-40 years. In other words, it takes from one twentieth to one two hundredth as much land as growing pulp from trees, and none of it need be crucial forest habitat (see the Vision Paper site). This is mostly a matter of habit and an economy that is distorted due to a long history of indirect subsidies through USFS roadways. No doubt, the factories would require retooling and it’s not an instant change, but mills that run on yellow pine could be converted and cheap sources of pulp that are close to the plants should provide enough incentive for producers to eventually retool.

Finally, there is the problem of water, which is a double problem. In much of the US, especially West of the Mississippi river, we are facing an impending water crisis. We are simply using it up faster than it is getting replaced and, if we are to avoid the collapse of the Western US, we need to conserve. Furthermore, pumping water around the country is one of our most energy-intensive activities (in Californian, water utilities are the largest users of electricity, which is why most are in the power generation business as well). As I type this, a brief soundbite from Schwarzenegger came across the radio and I caught the words “water crisis”! Making water turns out to be a little harder than growing hemp, but if we make water more expensive, large users will no doubt start doing grey water recycling. Personally, if my water bill rose by 50%, that would hardly affect me at all. It would only be a few dollars. Only domestic users who live in places where they have no business growing green lawns (i.e. almost anywhere West of the Mississippi), but insist on growing them anyway, would have a significant increase in their water bills and, frankly, that’s their stupid choice. I live in a place maladapted to growing lawns, so we do not grow one and neither to most of our neighbors. I don’t understand the American obsession with lawns no matter what the economic and environmental cost (most lawns are laced with a cocktail of poisons anyway). Large users like paper mills, though, would have great incentive to recycle their water and reuse it.

The final problem is waste. Paper recycling is simply not a continual process. Paper can get recycled once or twice and then it is just waste. Bill McDonough’s solution is simply not to be used at all. His book is printed using reusable synthetic paper and, at least in theory, reusable ink. That’s his vision anyway. Realistically, though, for low-value applications, it may be hard to match that. Perhaps there should be no low-value uses for paper. If prices rose, perhaps we would be forced into reusable and truly recyclable materials. In the meantime, one can hope that the same enzymatic processes that will eventually allow for energy production from willow and switchgrass will also make it possible to turn paper into fuel, rather than just burying it. There are, of course, many inefficiencies in that system, but it beats putting it in the ground.

In the meantime, go change your margins and print on both sides of the paper.