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Water wars

Between Tennessee and Georgia:

On Monday, senators from the Peach State approved a resolution that suggests shifting a miniscule section of its border with Tennessee, starting at the tristate corner, to include a portion of Nickajack’s shoreline. The move would entitle Georgia to draw water from the Tennessee River, which snakes through both Tennessee and Alabama but leaves their drought-ridden neighbor missing out on its valuable resource by a matter of feet.

This is very much about watering lawns and washing driveways but also, too, mostly all about the absolute lack of regional planning that has fueled the ‘growth’ all around Atlanta. A senseless culture of waste that now falls back on a legal option that isn’t at all likely to provide relief.

But much more to the point, this is preview of similar disputes coming soon to a country near you as a result of climate change.

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Running on Air

If you are watching the NAT&TCAA basketball tournament, you’re seeing a lot of swanky car commercials, especially for upper high-end models from Benz and BMW. The one above is for some super duper 2014 model that you can’t buy yet, and probably can’t afford at all, but it makes the case underscored by the ads punctuating breathless timeouts between the basketball action: dramatic innovations in styling for an utterly archaic propulsion system.

Nothing has changed in the way these amazing chariots propel themselves down the asphalt. Exotic wood inlay on the dashboard? check. 19-speaker surround sound? you bet. HD reverse cameras so you don’t have to turn around to back down the magisterial driveway? Available even in the cheap-O models, nowadays.

Do we think about the fact that the fuel they use and that fuel’s effects on the world remains exactly the same, even with all of the fantastic engineering available?

The fact is it’s easy not to think about this, to nod along with incremental MPG stats while we drool over the nice lines and sleek interiors. But this news from Peugeot made me think about it:

In January, Peugeot announced that it had developed a car that ran on air. It officially launched the Hybrid Air vehicle to the world at the Geneva motor show this month, and revealed that it would be in production by 2016. The car did not solely run on air, of course; the new technology was twinned with a petrol engine. But Peugeot believed that it had significant advantages over battery-powered electric hybrids, such as a Toyota Prius. Their cars would be cheaper to buy, for a start, and extra savings would come from a fuel economy of around 81 miles per gallon.

So what has MB and the ultimate driving machinists been doing this whole time? Makes you wonder.

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Cyber Blogging

Just go here. Lemieux points the way. Rees on Right-wronging the Iracle:

In that 2005 essay, you’ll recall, Ignatieff said the reason the American public wanted to invade Iraq was to spread “The Ultimate Task of Thomas Jefferson’s Dream.” (I am not making a joke. This is for real.) And, he implied, anyone who opposed the invasion of Iraq did so because they hated Thomas Jefferson– and they didn’t believe in the Ultimate Tasks of Dreams!

So far, so GREAT, right?

Ignatieff’s latest essay is what Latin people call a “mea culpa,” which is Greek for “Attention publishers: I am ready to write a book about the huge colossal mistake I made.” I imagine the book will be about a man struggling to do the right thing– a man who thinks with his heart and dares, with a dream in each fist, to reach for the stars. It’s about a journey: a journey from idealistic, starry-eyed academic to wizened, war-weary politician. (Ignatieff used to work at Harvard’s Kennedy School; now he’s Prime Chancellor of Canada’s Liberal Delegate or whatever kind of wack-ass, kumbaya government they’ve got up there.)

In a way, it’s a story much like Cormac McCarthy’s recent best-selling “The Road.” Both follow a hero’s long march through thankless environments– in Ignatieff’s case, from the theory-throttled, dusty tower of academia to the burned-out hell-hole of representative politics. Danger lurks. Grime abounds. The narrative tension is: Can the hero be wrong about everything, survive, and still convince people he’s smarter than everyone in Moveon.org?

I was excited when I first saw this new essay: At last, Ignatieff was going to come clean about his super-duper-double-dipper errors. I expected a no-holds barred, personal excoriation. In fact, I assumed the first, last, and only sentence of the essay would be: “Please, for the love of God, don’t ever listen to me again.”

HOWEVER. . .

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March 20, 2003

Today was the day. There is no greater crime than to make war based on lies and deception. So many are complicit, but I’ll focus here on the gatekeepers – the bored media that became intoxicated with the idea of war, helped to gin up support in the public and then kept blood off the evening news. But there was blood.

Iraq

Image from Dependable Renegade.

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A weird kind of phoenix analogy

You hear U.S. Republicans mention the so-called Solyndra boondoggle all the time. They’re not really interested in solar energy or that company in particular, and the story is just a cudgel to try and hit the Obama administration for bad decision-making. It’s quite disingenuous, of course, and government guarantees for the company would be a good opportunity to digress on energy industry subsidies in general. But Republicans have long lost the utility for substantive debate.

But this Technology Review article suggests that a quite a few more solar energy companies need to die so that the industry can rise:

If Suntech fails and shuts down its factories, that might not be a bad thing. Some industry experts say that hundreds of solar companies need to fail to help bring solar panel supply back in line with demand. That would slow the fall in prices and, as demand recovers, allow companies to justify buying new equipment and introducing the innovations that will ultimately be needed for solar power to compete with fossil fuels.

But there’s a good chance that Suntech, and many other companies in China, will be bailed out by local governments, which would delay the much-needed reduction in production capacity. Worldwide, solar companies have the capacity to manufacture between 60 and 70 gigawatts of solar panels a year, but demand in 2013 is only expected to be about 30 gigawatts.

The worldwide glut of solar panels—which has lasted nearly two years—is partly the result of big government-backed investments in solar panel factories in China, where two-thirds of solar panel production capacity is located. The surplus has been good news for consumers and solar panel installers because it’s helped drive a precipitous drop in solar panel prices. They’ve dropped 60 percent since the beginning of 2011, according to GTM Research. Solar panels sold for $4 per watt eight years ago. Now it’s common to buy solar panels at 78 cents per watt, says Jenny Chase, an analyst at Bloomberg New Energy Finance.

There is all kinds of disfunction about late-stage capitalism, and among them is that supply and demand aren’t allowed to work as they should; people, d/b/a corporations, scream about free markets but want protection and bailouts for bad-decision making; there’s moral hazard for the poor but not for the rich and never for big banks or hedge funds; and of course ‘competition’ is actually defined as monopoly in everything from cable TV and wireless broadband to chips, beer, soda pop and office supplies.

You can see how the mighty solar industry might work if left to find its market equilibrium. Although it can’t compete with the built-in advantages enjoyed by the poor little fossil pollution industry, which is under attack from those mean ole externalities and hence, needs our support.

But there’s some poetry to a solar industry rising from flames, if you’re still interested in poetry and solar energy. And I think you are.

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World of Waldman

The poet Anne Waldman is a national treasure, a connection to some of the most profound American cultural high notes of the last 40+ years who is still showing us the way today.

I interviewed her for my show last year (video soon here) and she was an endearing guest who shared with me some of the simple joys of conversation, even amidst the enormous breadth of her poetic presence. In honor of that, here is her poem, “The Lie” from Helping the Dreamer: Selected Poems, 1966-1988 (Coffee House Press, 1989):

Art begins with a lie

The separation is you plus me plus what we make

Look into lightbulb, blink, sun’s in your eye

I want a rare sky

vantage point free from misconception

Art begins with a lie

Nothing to lose, spontaneous rise

of reflection, paint the picture

of a lightbulb, or eye the sun

How to fuel the world, then die

Distance yourself from artfulness

How? Art begins with a lie

The audience wants to cry

when the actors are real & passionate

Look into footlight, then feed back to eye

You fluctuate in an artful body

You try to imitate the world’s glory

Art begins with a lie

That’s the story, sharp speck in the eye.

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Indy retailing Green

Independent_decreaseD.I.Y. is everywhere – look at this blog you’re reading, the e-book you could be reading there to the right. All of this is good, but it’s easy to be just a wasteful as large corporations, only on a small scale. But independent retailers can make being green part of their business plan from the get-go. A reader sends this handy guide:

4. Reduce paper use. Print double-sided, reuse printed paper for scrap paper, and think before you print.

5. Buy local. When possible, source your products from local distributors or producers to reduce fossil fuel use.

6. Go digital. Switch to digital bill payment, invoicing, banking and ordering. You can also send email rather than printed memos or offer downloadable employee handbooks. Use an eFax service instead of a paper machine.

7. Get rid of Styrofoam. Styrofoam is one of the least environmentally friendly products you can use. Find alternatives to Styrofoam for everything from cups to packing peanuts, both in what you sell and in what you use in the warehouse.

It would be great if all of this was just common sense, but we’re not quite there yet. I particularly like number 19. Create incentives, reward people for not being in cars. We’ll get the message.

Image: symbol for independent decrease, used in mounting circuit breakers and industrial control equipment inside equipment racks, via wikimedia commons.

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What happened in Wisconsin yesterday

is a preview of where republicans, specifically those in control of Wisconsin but all of them in general, want to take the country. How do you codify environmental pillage into law?

Pierce:

the bill is an almost perfect example of the conception held my modern conservatives — which is to say, Republicans — of the way things are supposed to work, and an almost perfect example of the conservative idea of self-government as public oligarchy. And the last one is that it truly is an atrocious bill, being, at the same time, an environmental catastrophe, a staggering economic giveaway, and a deliberate and obvious offense against the idea of a political commonwealth.

It is the latter that is the most disturbing. They not only passed the bill, but eliminated any chance the people of Wisconsin had to protect themselves.  For example, nobody denies that the massive open-pit mine that Gogebic Taconite plans to gouge out of northern Wisconsin is bound to do environmental damage. The Republicans who pushed for the bill admitted that openly.

And, with numerous groups already vowing to challenge the bill in court, Sen. Tom Tiffany also acknowledged that changes were made to the legislation to put the state on stronger legal ground to withstand such a challenge. “The bill reflects the reality of mining. There are going to be some impacts to the environment above the iron ore body,” said Tiffany, R-Hazelhurst. “If the law is challenged and ends up in court, the judge needs to know it was the Legislature’s intent to allow adverse (environmental) impacts. That way, a judge can’t find fault if the environment is impact.

The legislation was written in such a way as to defang the state’s Department Of Natural Resources, provide what is essentially a liability shield for the company, overturn over a century of environmental protection laws for the benefit of a single company, and it even contained a provision repealing a state legal law dating back to the 1880’s that prevented Wisconsin land from being controlled by foreign corporations or government, leading more than a few people to wonder exactly who’s going to get the 75 kajillion jobs that Walker and his pet legislature insist the mine will provide. In short, despite the fact that polls show substantial opposition to both the bill and the mine itself, and despite the fact that its sponsors admit the destruction it inevitably will cause, the Wisconsin legislature passed a law not only to permit the project to go forward, but to immunize the corporation against any destruction the project might wreak on the state and the people therein. They gave away public lands to this company while arranging that the political entity known as the state of Wisconsin, and therefore the people they ostensibly represent, would be unable to protect themselves from the damage the company will do. Self-government, and the political commonwealth that arises from it, is just something else gouged out of Wisconsin for a buck. This is astonishing. This is something that happens in China.

This is raw state capitalism at its most egregious, and it demonstrates clearly that the conservative movement has plans that go back in history beyond rolling back the Great Society or the New Deal. They are after every progressive advance made since the end of the 19th Century. This isn’t something that the conservative movement is trying to hide.

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Qu’est-ce que ça veux dire, le vert?

As I’ve mentioned previously, one of the many tender mercies of walking to work everyday is that I don’t subject myself to NPR nearly as often as I once did. One of the painful reminders of this is when I take the green kids to school once in a while and find self so enthralled again, just like old crappy times.

So this morning, as it so happens and I only mention because it was such a softball non-story to get right that they whiffed on so badly that I must.

A discussion, and it’s probably online somewhere but I will not take the .000784 seconds required to find it, about new Secretary of State John Kerry and how he was forced during his presidential campaign to play down his foreign language proficiency but is now flaunting it. Fine. And they played a snip of him during a lunch in Paris saying something completely gracious to his hosts, and then another of him being so comfortable with a Turkish official that Kerry forgot to listen to the translation – insinuating that his elitist languagism was somehow at fault and it was a terrible low point. Or something.

Listen. How hard is it? How difficult is it to highlight Kerry’s ability to communicate with his DIPLOMATIC counterparts in French, Italian or German as an example of an unadulterated good? Why not point out how relieved we all might be for the moment that his international colleagues might feel the least bit respected by being addressed in their language by an American in their country? Further, maybe go on to ask other intriguing questions: What does language do? What is it for? How do you learn other languages? What possibilities for friendship, cooperation, romance or just understanding might it unlock?

Instead I explain the idiocy of man-bites-dog to green boy. I’ll stop raging on NPR when they stop reporting the news like dopes.

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In Less Green News

The New York Times Green Blog is shutting down:

But we will forge ahead with our aggressive reporting on environmental and energy topics, including climate change, land use, threatened ecosystems, government policy, the fossil fuel industries, the growing renewables sector and consumer choices.

By doing less of it.

Maybe they’re starting a new Oscars blog?