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FlimFlam alert

This editorial from the LAt brings up an interesting situation that we’re already in, as the EPA leans toward issuing a ruling on whether greenhouses gases are a danger to public health. If they do, which they are likely to, it will lead directly to some forms of preliminary carbon dioxide regulation. It’s going to be difficult and people are going to be screaming; driving a car is going to get more expensive when everything else already is. But is it the end of the world? That’s an interesting question.

Firmly focused on the downside is the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, which has long argued that a climate-change crackdown would devastate Main Street America, imposing costly permitting requirements on such facilities as schools, hospitals and office buildings. Reacting to news of the pending EPA finding, chamber officials are even claiming that it would undermine President Obama’s economic stimulus package because infrastructure projects to be built with the money would be delayed by reviews of their impact on greenhouse gases.

Not really. The EPA finding would apply only to emissions from vehicles. If the agency does find that they endanger the public, it would add urgency to a process that’s already underway to toughen fuel-efficiency standards. Eventually, it might also lead to regulation of emissions from other sources, particularly power plants. But that’s years away, and onerous rules for schools and offices are unlikely. As for the stimulus money, most or all will be spent by the time the EPA gets around to regulating new construction.

It’s already really expensive to drive a car, only we don’t count all of the negative externalities as costs. These would include, of course, tailpipe emissions but also everything from the human design fiasco that is our highway-connected suburbs to the strips of fast-food joints that line them to the talk radio poison we self-inject sitting in so much traffic everyday. This is to say nothing of the wars and armaments necessary to safeguard said sources of earlier-described dangers to public health. No hyperbole is necessary to see all the ways we could begin to change how we live just by taking their real costs into account – not to mention, as the editorial does, the costs of doing nothing.

So get ready for the rending of garments as the EPA is demonized and carbon pricing construed as the end of civilization as we know it. There’s an irony I will not explain (Mean Joe?). The EPA will be doing its job in accordance with our laws. As the editorial points out, there will be winners and losers in so doing. But, in reference to the above, why shouldn’t we see ourselves as winners in this grand scrum, focusing on the things we will decide to change as positive steps?

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Crisis parody

More good examples for new and improved corporate logos, here.

Sometimes ridicule goes a long way, unless the targets (as I’ve come upon recently – and locally) insist on being deliberately obtuse such that the meaning of your critique continues to (magically) escape them. Of course, I accept this failure as none other than my own.

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Have You Seen The Bridge, part XXI

People wonder what is happening. I certainly do, and it’s a natural curiosity. If only we were free to pursue any and everything we wanted, things would be so much better. In more ways than we care to imagine, we remain quite free to do as we please. There are some limits to be acknowledged. But there always were.

This new Gallup poll, via, points up some reluctance to embrace either these limits or to remain free to do as we please, sort of one or the other but not both. It is a squinting sort of acknowledgment where, if you strain or blur yours eyes, everything looks the same. Note the wording of the question:

Even if? That’s quite a hypothetical, knowing what we know. The indulgence to qualify what we might be willing to do in the event that what is going on is actually going on trails off from some deep shallowness, an allowance, a remove, a disconnect, however we want to identify it. The present is not sinking in. Maybe our quintessential optimism had to spring from somewhere – and this abrupt denial of the choices before us, based on the ones we’ve taken off the table, is it.

It brings to mind a conversation with a friend last night, a painter on his way back to his studio in Kansas. He had been in New England and related a dinner conversation there where people, otherwise sympathetic to environmental causes, were lamenting the prospect of wind turbines proposed for the Nantucket Sound. It would ruin their views, he said in disbelief, adding that the sentiment ran much the same in the Flint Hills, where similar proposals were being greeted with similar opposition, based on the same reluctance to deform the spectacular views of rolling hills with those God-awful renewable energy sources.

I personally have a deep affinity for magnificent vistas. Should we wait until they become directly encroached upon by burning coal for power to have a clearer choice, to make a choice that wouldn’t have been so bad after all? The choice doesn’t seem so clear at this point. There’s a time gap in which, one suspects, a belief in the power to return to just before the tipping point prevails. If and when we sufficiently win ourselves over on the wisdom of making the right decisions (and it’s not inevitable), we’ll go back and do just that.

I appreciate this kind of reporting, even if it confirms what we already know, that describes, in fact, the engine which has transported us to this point in the first place. But, in terms of the twin fantasies of time travel and an ability to reconcile ourselves with needed measures, we need to figure out a way to get there from here.

Photograph: Natural Bridge, La Prele Canyon. Converse County, Wyoming, 1870. courtesy USGS

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And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.

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And it begins

Rob from GPB wanted me to say something about the death of the suburbs, and I did. And I delicately touch on this in the column regularly (there is no delicate way to say it). And now, enter the Washington Post.

As housing prices have plummeted and credit has shriveled, more residents of the District and Washington’s inner suburban counties have chosen to stay put, all but ending the steady exodus to the region’s less expensive, outer suburbs that characterized most of this decade, according to Census Bureau estimates released today.

“I looked at these numbers and said, ‘Wow!’ ” said William H. Frey, a demographer from the Brookings Institution who analyzed the figures. “This is a more drastic change in U.S. migration patterns than we’ve seen in a long time, and I don’t think we’ve seen the end of it.”

Indeed not, Mr. Frey. I’ll venture to say it will increasingly become much less of a novel comment to say that suburbs/exurbs are dying and have no future. There was a great euphemism in an LAT article recently: phased abandonment. It’s good that we’ll get beyond this polite boundary and get to what comes next. What comes next for these locales remains to be determined, but probably will have much to do with quiet and farming, and sometimes both, together.

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It’s Like Blue, Pink and Yellow, Only Different

Inside this Newsweek story about AIG, via Atrios, is a nugget that gets at our own larger house of cards, into which they are few ways in – but once you’re in, they are literally no ways out. To wit:

Most of this as-yet-undiscovered problem, Gober says, lies in the area of reinsurance, whereby one insurance company insures the liabilities of another so that the latter doesn’t have to carry all the risk on its books. Most major insurance companies use outside firms to reinsure, but the vast majority of AIG’s reinsurance contracts are negotiated internally among its affiliates, Gober says, and these internal balance sheets don’t add up. The annual report of one major AIG subsidiary, American Home Assurance, shows that it owes $25 billion to another AIG affiliate, National Union Fire, Gober maintains. But American has only $22 billion of total invested assets on its balance sheet, he says, and it has issued another $22 billion in guarantees to the other companies. “The American Home assets and liquidity raise serious questions about their ability to make good on their promise to National Union Fire,” says Gober, who has a consulting business devoted to protecting policyholders. Gober says there are numerous other examples of “cooked books” between AIG subsidiaries. Based on the state insurance regulators’ own reports detailing unanswered questions, the tally in losses could be hundreds of billions of dollars more than AIG is now acknowledging.

Think concentric economies of scale without the redundancies. When one ring goes beyond what it’s able to support on it’s own, it leverages an outer ring to “insure” itself against loses. I don’t know any other way but to use the scare quotes around insure, and neither do they.

This insurance examiner happened to be from Mississippi, so take that area as a case in point. When you hear about all the beach front property that gets threatened or actually destroyed from storms, huge dollar amounts invariably get tossed around. Small enclaves of precarious oceanfront property could theoretically be insured against loss, say by a local firm or even Lloyds of London (if they still exist), if the property owners had sufficient capital to pay incredibly hefty premiums to insure property that is, for all intents and purposes but especially in plain old chances-of-anything-happening kinds of risk, built in the wrong place. Lovely perhaps, but fleeting. (For more on this, see love, definition of)

Now, for one thing, this would likely limit the number of houses and towns built in precarious geographical areas, and we wouldn’t want to do that –  celui sera UnAmurican. But anyway… stop anywhere here along the way, economically speaking, and the vista is much the same. Once you go beyond those who can afford to build, live and rebuild in danger-prone areas and extend the opportunity to the rest of anyone who wants the lovely, the insurance companies can’t guarantee these investments, even though they will write policies saying that someone* will. We send the risk spiraling outward, trying to leverage the power of the outer rings. But even there, the big firms can’t even write down their actual liabilities – because they wouldn’t be able to cover them in the eventuality of anything catastrophic across scales happening, otherwise known as the events they’re writing insurance to cover.

*Now, what if we stipulated from the outset that this someone was the government, aka the taxpayers? And what if as a part of such ventures other responsibilities were attached the ‘parties of the first part’ that raised the bar for how we go about insuring things? What if, in other words, everyone had to be honest about all of this, what would be different? Less beachfront property? Would the U.S. be a third-world backwater without the necessity to Pyramid-scheme at every opportunity? This is what we would have ourselves believe, that without such security and assurances, such as it is, we would wouldn’t be so prosperous.

I’ll leave it to you to re-assess the shifting definitions of those last few words in light of recent events.

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Two Left Interwebbed Feet

The maelstrom and convulsion we entered some time ago, which we have been so slow to notice even as the  passing scenery has begun to repeat like the same bunch of clouds and mountains, documented in the incredibly shrinking newspaper sense, here. Maybe cartoon language is one of the few we still understand. It’s got to have something to do with that ‘all I ever needed to know I learned in kindergarten’ sort of thing. If that’s true, good for you. Anyway, that’s an excellent piece above, so thanks, Andy.

You might wonder, and I can only hope you do, why the clockwise newspaper drain swirl, financial melt and eco/energy colossus are all coming of age at the same time. It could make you curious about what we’ve been feeding them. Born mostly at about the same time – say at or near about the time governments began insuring East India companies in their forays into the New World – all of our societal sub-structures are breaking up into mini ice floes, drifting out to Dieu knows where, as we struggle with how to tie them together again. As much as that might be an unfortunate metaphor, it can’t help but seem – even to a kindergartener – like practice for something.

To that end, and pardon the pun, it’s always better take in a geographer-anthropologist matinee:

PAUL SOLMAN: Of all the cultures you’ve studied that have tried to deal with severe economic dislocations, what’s the marker of resiliency?

JARED DIAMOND: It seems to me that one of the predictors of a happy versus an unhappy outcome has to do with the role of the elite or the decision-makers or the politicians or the rich people within the society.

If the society is structured so that the decision-makers themselves suffer from the consequences of their decisions, then they’re motivated to make decisions that are good for the whole society, whereas if the decision-makers can make decisions that insulate themselves from the rest of society, then they’re likely to make decisions that are bad for the rest of society.

That last bit via the Poorman.

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Take my Train… Please

Been noticing the Acela advertisements across the banner of the NYT. It seemed like a good time to note the formerly diverted attention being paid to Amtrak. One hopes this is just the beginning of significant funding.

Good news for rail supporters. Last Friday, Vice President Joe Biden and 12 members of Congress gathered at Union Station in Washington, D.C. to discuss prioritizing transit. Standing outside in front of an Amtrak passenger car (whose aesthetically displeasing exterior reinforced the message for much needed funding), a purposeful Biden made the case for his favorite mode of transportation:

“Amtrak is a national treasure, For too long we haven’t made the investments we needed to make it as safe, as reliable, as secure as it can be. That ends now.”

I love how Republicans counter with charges of “wasteful spending!” Apparently, an interstate highway has a capacity of about 2,000 cars/hour and thereafter begins to resemble a parking lot.

The South seems so very far away from the rail-connected cities of the Northeast. Because it is. But you can still take the Silver Meteor between Boston and Miami, and the Silver Crescent from NY to New Orleans and many points in between. The line switches from diesel to electric at DC, then you can take commuter lines in various directions. In addition, the drive between Richmond and Atlanta is very long and hardly enjoyable. And in one direction, you arrive in a city where you really don’t need a car. Would be great if Atlanta (originally called Terminus, as it was the place where many train lines ended) became known as a place people left their cars.

We’ve planned an upcoming trip to NYC by train. When you price the four airline tickets, getting to the airport, parking, then the trip into the city from La Guardia vs. arriving directly into Penn station, the prices are comparable. Maybe the more people do this, the more trains they’ll add to the route, ultimately moving the price downward.

Plus, besides being able to leave my shoes on until I want to take them off, it should be fun. And it you get to see all those backyards otherwise hidden from view.

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Hello… is this thing On?

Ah, the question. The answer is self-evident but we will continue to provide it.

The master’s of business administration, a gateway credential throughout corporate America, is especially coveted on Wall Street; in recent years, top business schools have routinely sent more than 40 percent of their graduates into the world of finance.

But with the economy in disarray and so many financial firms in free fall, analysts, and even educators themselves, are wondering if the way business students are taught may have contributed to the most serious economic crisis in decades.

“It is so obvious that something big has failed,” said Ángel Cabrera, dean of the Thunderbird School of Global Management in Glendale, Ariz. “We can look the other way, but come on. The C.E.O.’s of those companies, those are people we used to brag about. We cannot say, ‘Well, it wasn’t our fault’ when there is such a systemic, widespread failure of leadership.”

With apologies to the Thunderbird School of Global Management, all of the time, energy and soul expended separating you from your money has taken a toll, with interest compounded annually somewhere in the range of 8-10%, when the margin for error was minuscule. We/they didn’t have that much time, energy or soul to spare and now it looks a bit pathetic to say we need to tweak the edges of how we were doing things and somehow tack back toward some mythical center. Systemic means systemic and there is no polite way to systematically factor out people and planet as liabilities in pursuit of higher profits. So fond are we of the quote that sums up our civilization with two words and a contraction, “It’s just business.”

What’s left when that’s all that’s left? In an inconvenient bit of symmetry, no polite route will right this no-future course. Change your ways or have them changed for you. Smartest guys in the room, indeed.

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Planet Split Over Plan to Support Human Life

In the category of parallel universes, consensus continues to jell around the idea that measures to counter catastrophic climate change are really a bothersome nuisance thinking people would be better off ignoring. And while there is some psychological credence to accepting this plan, the downsides are also a tad unsettling.

How should one navigate this quagmire of conflicted opinion? With an automatic locking rear differential and an EPA est. 15/21 city/hwy? By contracting a conglomerate’s Greek Letter-plated consulting arm in order to reduce your company’s energy and water waste? Or how about an individual bubble all your own to ride out all those frosty Inland mornings when the tide washes in over the Handy-mart parking lot and you can’t find your crocs in time to leap over the puddles for your first Burp-y of the day? Okay… went a little too far with that last one, but for a Sunday we’re really putting our best cognitive dissonance on display.

While we’re putting our commercial proclivities to such good use, we might imagine a few ways to distract ourselves with causes that matter. Or the gymnastic possibility (nimble, strong) exists that we might not be able to this on our own. In tribute to an equality of possibilities, where no great consequence may outweigh another, where time is a mere illusion, a subtle question rests: when is a distraction not a distraction?