Morning Fog

Two Natures

The ten-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina's devastating effects on New Orleans has occasioned reviews of what has been done since then to lessen the potential effects of the next such storm. 

One of the key items on such a list, obviously, is the storm surge barrier about 12 miles east of the New Orleans - intended to thwart a wall of ocean from heading straight for the city, it's nearly two miles long and one of the largest projects the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers has ever built.

An item in yesterday's Washington Post also describes efforts to reshape the Mississippi River delta in a way that helps rebuild wetlands - wetlands that help mitigate the effects of oncoming storms but have been washed away by earlier efforts to "fix" the river.  (I'd provide a link to this very interesting article, except that I can find no trace of it on the WP website.)

Next, I suppose, we'll hear of some brilliant scheme to prevent the rupture of the San Andreas Fault by pouring billions of tons of epoxy into it? 

We may flatter ourselves that we can hold off, or reverse, geologic change; I'm not convinced.  On a small scale and a short time frame (the foundation wall of my house, 20 years) it might just be possible.  But when we consider the massive forces at work over a huge area in southern Louisiana, I'm not at all sure.  In the long run (which admittedly, most of us won't be here to see) we may just be building the potential for a more cataclysmic disaster.  It may make more sense to work harder to understand what's occurring on the grand scale, and perhaps develop plans to get ourselves out of the way. 

We probably won't.  It's human nature to try to master, even alter, the world we live in; it's Mother Nature to demonstrate to us that we can't.  

Papal Effects On The Environment

The Pope's recent encyclical on saving the planet is ground-breaking simply by the subject matter chosen, so perhaps for that reason alone, it has attracted a lot of attention. 

There has been a lot of negative reaction.  The Pope?  Environment?  The juxtaposition doesn't compute, it's not his business, he can't blame capitalism for the deteriorating state of our air, water, and earth.  A lot of this comes from the same people who are challenged in the encyclical:  climate-change deniers, for example, and commercial-industrial interests who suggest that a profitable end justifies any means.

However, environmentalists have good reason to be pleased by most of the points the Pope makes, and The National Catholic Reporter approves the Pop's message and interprets it as a "challenge to the rich." 

I think it's great for the Pope to express his view.  He unquestionably has global influence, and if he can help to make saving the environment a moral issue, he may be able to add impetus and urgency to the movement toward change. 

Perhaps, though, he has missed a trick.  His suggestions - and those of many other environmental activists - really treat the symptoms of our environmental problems rather than the root cause.  For example, I myself often rail against "Big Oil" and the profits they reap, yet at the same time I have to acknowledge that they couldn't keep on doing what they do without the excuse of a very real and seemingly insatiable demand for energy.  Burning fossil fuels is a symptom, but overextended human population growth is the root cause of nearly all the various ways in which we homos-not-so-sapiens foul our own nest.

That's why I read the lengthy "Laudato si" encyclical in full.  [Evidently the authoritative final English version isn't yet available but you can find a translation of the pre-release version, dated May 24, on www.papalencyclicals.net.]  It's a page-turner (really!) with a lot of good thinking on environmental issues, but given the centrality of population in the save-the-world equation, I particularly wanted to see whether Francis might consider revoking/revising the 1968 encyclical referred to as "Humanae vitae," which reaffirmed the Roman Catholic church's ban on artificial birth control. That would indeed be a find, something to get excited about!

I don't expect to find it, and I didn't. Instead, there was this, in Paragraph 120:

Since everything is interrelated, concern for the protection of nature is also incompatible with the justification of abortion. How can we genuinely teach the importance of concern for other vulnerable beings, however troublesome or inconvenient they may be, if we fail to protect a human embryo, even when its presence is uncomfortable and creates difficulties? “If personal and social sensitivity towards the acceptance of the new life is lost, then other forms of acceptance that are valuable for society also wither away”.

Well, I suppose that's palpably and predictably papal.  But for me, particularly if "everything is interrelated," how can we possibly exclude rampant population growth from consideration as we seek to pin down the relationship between the finite and the infinite?

 

Pouting Police

Yesterday was the funeral service of NYPD Detective Liu, the second of the two who were murdered just a couple of weeks ago, just because they were cops.  The shootings were senseless and tragic.  And I've always said that the police are much underrated and underappreciated; the risks they take, the dangers they are constantly faced with, are far from commensurate to the respect or the pay they get.

Nevertheless, I do think those who choose to turn their backs on the Mayor at these events are making a mistake.  First, because the Mayor is responsible to the voters, and therefore to public opinion.  Not to the police!  He should of course support his people (the NYPD) where possible, yet some of the problems recently brought to light can't be defended by any elected official. 

Second, because the policemen's willingness to "act out," fight their bureaucratic battles in public, and blame the mayor makes them look not just childish, but unprofessional and selfish; it makes it appear they are more concerned with defending themselves than honoring those who died.  Worst, an emotional response like this reinforces the impression that they may react emotionally, rather than measuredly, under pressure, and this is the very thing that has raised questions in the first place.

In short:  NYPD, suck it up.  Like professionals in service in other walks of life, you should understand that it's not about you.  Your reaction (if you're among the back-turners) obscures what you stand for (or should stand for).

Wired

Out for a morning walk earlier this week, I noticed that a big, fat, full moon was still visible, clear and high in the morning sky, even at 7:30 AM.

As 21st-century man is wont to do, I whipped out my cell phone to capture this relatively mundane event for posterity.

But there was a problem.  Wires.  Electrical, telephone, cable.  Poles. Transformers.  Useful but ugly infrastructure strung across my view of the sky.  We may have trained our eyes to selectively and subconsciously omit some of this junk, but the camera captures all, as this photo indicates:

 

Further, though I tried many angles and distances, from a variety of spots along my route, it was impossible to find a place from which to snap any kind of photo without finding a good deal of man's despoliage of his horizons.  This, in a low-rise residential neighborhood!  It's much worse in commercial areas.  Of course, with a telephoto lens, or with severe cropping, it's possible to get a moon no wires, like this: 

 

But it sort of lacks context, don't you think?

Problems with over head wires aren't new; their shortcomings are not just visual and electrical interference, but susceptibility to weather, which brings us several power outages of various lengths throughout the year, with concomitant costs of repair and restoration.  Meanwhile, the companies that spread the blight continue to insist that underground cabling is "too expensive."

Still, on the grand scale of things, it's as if a huge spider were attempting to wrap the globe in its web - and doing a pretty good job of it, too -- closing us all in for eventual transmogrification from plump and juicy morsels to hollow shells sucked dry of fluid. 

How does this industrial version of the "world-wide web" affect mankind's spirit of discovery, adventure, freedom?   Will space exploration grind to a halt when we have so thoroughly swaddled the earth in conduit that there is no way for a rocket to poke through?  Would Wilbur and Orville have been inspired to their work on manned flight if their view of the sky had been hemmed in by a thick network of wires? 

[A fair corollary for consideration: would they have done so if they had known what a squalid experience air travel would become within just a few decades?] 

Is wireless technology the answer?  So far, it lacks reliability.  My fairly high-grade cell phone still does not produce as clear an audio experience as my old-fashioned "land line."  The giant spider proceeds, inexorably...

 

Oil Rush

An excellent MSN piece today reports on some of the exaggeration and wild speculation going on amongst oil companies regarding the amounts of reserves of oil shale.  As the article itself is entitled, "We're Sitting on 10 Billion Barrels of Oil! OK, Two!" 

Of course we shouldn't be surprised.  This sort of exaggeration accompanies every boom, especially in fields where it's easy to make claims, and not so easy to disprove them with cold, hard facts.  And the motivation is clear:  pump up stock prices of course, but also, influence legislation and rip the governmental fetters off our poor, downtrodden (and by the way, heavily subsidized) oil companies.  Since oil is no longer scarce, let's export it!  And let's keep burning it with abandon!

But we might choose to be disappointed, that humankind (or corporatekind - in the eyes of the Supremes, they're the same thing!) can't learn from past history.  The speculation about reserves seems to me to lead entirely in the wrong direction, at least until we have a better fix on actual reserves, and on their future exploitation.   But even if the wildest estimates are correct, they do nothing to address the issue that overhangs all the rest:  What about air quality?  It does us very little good to have reserves to last us the next 500 years if we're not going to be around to burn them.

Even greater unanswered questions remain too, for example, the effects of fracking on the earth's crust.  Are we certain that the process doesn't destabilize our fragile environment in ways we don't even understand yet?   We are not.

The new-found ability to exploit oil shale is definitely a boon in some ways; it lowers the cost of domestic oil (or could); it may help economies around the world rebound from recession; it takes the pressure off us in the race to find and develop alternative energies.  That is its promise.  And its threat.

Enviropolitics - Making Things Clear

There are a lot of people around the country, some of them even actually pretty well-educated in traditional terms, who obstinately resist the teachings and predictions of science regarding the global environment, and equally stubbornly insist it's either unnecessary or too costly to do anything about it.

I think the evidence is pretty clear, but my thinking has always been, even if you seriously believe that the burgeoning amounts of carbon dioxide around the globe are not due to human activity, why would you NOT want to keep known pollutants to a minimum anyway?  Do you pour gasoline on your garden?  Do you add cleaning fluid to your mac'n'cheese?  Do you drain your washing machine into the fishpond behind your house? 

Well, regardless:  Before the air gets too cloudy for the doubters to see what's right in front of their noses, President Obama is promulgating some new rules by executive order.   These rules may have their shortcomings and loopholes, but some progress surely is better than none.  Political opponents, of course, have vowed to oppose these rules, and roll them back if the Republican Party reclaims the Senate.

That's why I think it's worth noting that politically, Obama's timing makes a lot of sense.  Going public now, with midterm elections looming, serves to highlight the urgency of the problem, may help to kick off a useful discussion, and should force opponents out in the open, where they will have to be public about the expressed and actual reasons for their opposition. 

This may or may not succeed in moving the matter forward.  There are, after all, a lot of people to whom GOP arguments about short-term negatives versus long-term positives (e.g., minor upticks in fossil fuels short term, against air we can breathe and a climate in which we can physically exist, long term).   But it will certainly help to highlight some of the key differences between the parties.

The Politics Of Clean Air

The finding that a reduction of atmospheric aerosol particles probably leads to more tropical storms, is making the rounds in the media.

The good news, I think, is that the Clean Air Act has resulted in measurable reduction of aerosols in our air, and that such measures can, over time, produce real results.  Also good: that the identified storm effect is likely to become less significant over time as our atmosphere rebalances itself to something more like what prevailed in the 20th century.

Doug Smith, the co-author of this research, is quoted as saying "We don't want to give them the impression pollution is a good thing,"  by which he means that the effect of aerosol particles on increasing storm activity is not a good reason to let aerosols increase again, because they are dangerous to human health.  Well, Dr. Smith, I wouldn't count on it.

The bad news is that some of our elected representatives will misuse the headlines from this study to suggest that legislation to protect the environment is unnecessary or misguided.

 

 

Laboratories

Back when Napoleon was a pup, and schools taught government and civics (it's clear they no longer do because nobody under 50 seems to have the least concept of those topics), they used to tell us that our federal system, by leaving most functions to the states, meant that there was lots of room for experimenting with different laws, different solutions, different ways of doing things. 

So Nebraska, for example, decided it couldn't afford to have half its small population sitting around debating laws, and proved that a unicameral legislature could work.  Later Massachusetts, under the leadership of then-Governor Mitt Romney, was able to create a model near-universal health care system that was later heavily criticized by former Governor Mitt Romney (and became the Bain of his existence).

The states, they said, were little "laboratories of government."  But some labs produce penicillin, or teflon; others produce Frankenstein or nerve gas.

My state, Virginia, has been an especially busy experimental laboratory lately but has produced entries mainly in the latter category.  It was the first to go to court to challenge the Affordable Care Act; has actively considered a law requiring women who plan an abortion to get an ultrasound first; was the hatching-place of a cynical and opportunistic effort to gerrymander electoral districts to provide up to five more "safe" Republican districts; and has sought to enshrine in its Constitution the right of its citizens to own a gun from birth. 

Could all this silliness result from the fact that we are the poster-child purple state, with voters split evenly between Republicans and Democrats?   Our House of Delegates is Republican-controlled, our Senate is split exactly 50-50.  Yet thanks to the relative pragmatism of our current Republican Governor, the Commonwealth of Virginia appears to be on the verge of making some progress on its most pressing problem -- the woeful lack of funding for roads and other transportation.  

Governor McDonnell has cobbled together a package of funding measures that is balanced enough to make Democrats squawk  (such as using more general revenue for roads, at the expense of education) and Republicans rage (e.g., increasing the sales tax).  That's a good indication it's likely to pass, the first concrete (no pun intended) improvement in many a year - although right now, Democrats are holding it hostage to an understanding on how to handle Medicaid in future.

Could this workable compromise of a transportation bill put an end to the state's long string of Frankensteinish political inventiveness?  I'm not certain.  Understandably, there are controversial provisions in it, which are there for political reasons.  But one aspect of the legislations seems unfathomable and unnecessary to me:  By lowering the state's already low gasoline tax, while increasing the sales tax to compensate, it encourages the consumption of gasoline, while forcing all citizens to pay the freight for the gas-guzzlers.  It even imposes a special tax on "alternative fuel" vehicles!

This pouring fuel on the fiery demand for gasoline makes no sense to me - and it gives the new transportation solution the jerky, shuffling gait of a Frankenstein.   

Passive House

I think the things people are trying these days to improve the "sustainability" of the average residence are very exciting and positive.

A case in point is the "passive" house (the term refers to the actual structure, not to its residents).  One such is currently being built in the District of Columbia, and I'm familiar with one that exists here in Arlington, Virginia too.

As the Post reports on the house in Deanwood (DC), the passive house is designed - first and foremost - to use substantially less energy than most existing homes by being insulated, airtight, and using solar or geothermal energy rather than fossil fuel for heating and cooling.  Ideally, it's also designed for net-zero energy use, meaning that it would produce as much energy as it uses. 

As one of the designers notes, it's not too hard nowadays to build a "green" house if you've got plenty of money to spend on it.  So the second key design feature of the latest crop of sustainable houses is affordability.  This seems to be achievable, in current circumstances, by finding low-cost land and by constructing fairly small and simple houses.  But the technology used in these pioneering affordables will certainly also affect the middle of the market before long.

It's taken us a long time to get to this point.  The basic points - insulate well and reduce the number of holes you poke in the walls for utilities, windows, and such - has been a commonsense "gimme" for decades, yet was (and still is) largely ignored by builders.  Too many houses have been thrown up with little or no thought for their energy efficiency, I suppose for the same reason that builders often don't put in other features that people want. 

I often see the owners of new construction in my area spending still more money to modify things that the builder could have done more easily and cheaply -- add a deck, or better kitchen cabinets, or even an electric garage-door opener, for example.  That kind of retrofit modification is always expensive, but in the case of modifying a home's basic heating/cooling systems, it's horrendous if not impossible.  I hope the sustainability concept catches on more widely in the construction industry.  I'd love to live in such a house.  

Big Summer Storm Catches Utilities Flatfooted

Late on Friday, June 29, a line of numerous, intense, violent thunderstorms fanned out from somewhere just east of Chicago and caused immense damage in a wide swath of the U.S. mid-Atlantic region.  In greater Washington DC, up to 2 million customers were left without electric power.  As of this morning, a full week after the storm passed, about 4500 utility customers still had no power.  Companies were promising to complete the job by Sunday, nine days after the storm--  and just in time for another predicted band of heavy storms. 

And this was no hurricane, no tsunami, just a line of thunderstorms. True, the storm cluster was indeed unusual by its power and breadth, the kind of thing utilities like to label a "100-year-storm."   Except that it isn't.  Our last power outage of 3-to-5 days occurred only two years ago during heavy winter snowfall.  And another happened not so long before that.   In between those multiday ones, we've become accustomed to more frequent outages of several hours at a time.  The fact is that thanks to climate change, extraordinary is now the norm.  Utility planners appear not to have caught on to that fact, but it's time they did.

This storm has reawakened the oft-rehashed discussion about the wisdom of burying power lines.  Utilities have always insisted this is prohibitively expensive, yet many developed countries seem to be able to manage it (it's sort of like universal health care in that respect).   Our public utilities prescribe trimming trees, but they've been at that for years and clearly it hasn't worked.  Anyway, we should keep in mind that the more trees we cut, the more we contribute to climate change and help create more frequent and damaging storms. 

The discussion of buried lines may revive for a while, but it's unlikely to go anywhere unless it gets a push from (guess who?) - government.  Cost, productivity, and security factors provide ample reason to make that push.  More on that in my next post.

I believe our electrical Rip Van Winkles need to wake up to a new reality they are reluctant to acknowledge  Their environment is changing; if they don't change along with it, they'll soon be going where U.S. automakers were a few short years ago.  The trouble with that is that we don't have a handy second set of Japanese-made power lines standing by as alternatives. 

So there would be great utility in a change of course.