They write letters (actually, email) that link to this:
Last week President Obama and Secretary Vilsack approved Monsanto’s GMO alfalfa despite overwhelming public protest. This move fundamentally undermines the organic industry, especially organic meat and dairy. In approving GMO alfalfa the Obama administration has caved to Monsanto and made it harder for family farmers to make a living and for consumers wanting to eat safe, healthy foods.
Shake a finger at Monsanto and the Prez at the link.
Within the idea of adapting to a 2 or 3 degrees warmer world, there will be a certain level of non sequitur that, beyond its potential value as a literary/comedic device, we’ll also have to become accustomed. Along the lines of
Better Sunscreen
but also
Collecting, chopping wood for heat in winter
I think this choice bit of illogic is, er, adaptable, from a different point made by Yglesias:
it’s clear that Gutenberg’s invention of the Movable Type printing press was a transformative moment in human technological progress. It changed everything. And yet if you try to take a rigorous look at the economic statistics, it doesn’t show up. It’s invisible. There was no sustained increase in material living standards associated with the printing press. Or with clockmaking. Or with the sextant or the barometer or the reflecting telescope. Indeed, in terms of sustained increases in per capita living standards all the scientific and technical innovations of the 16th and 17th centuries produced absolutely nothing.
It’s the old constant increase in material living standards (by which we judge everything) vs. survival gambit. Before we can build profit and progress into innovations like solar roofing and light, electric cars, we’ll need to view them first as just things we need to get by. Really need.
There’s actually a magazine called Southern Distinction around here. Anyway, what do you know about Reconstruction? Via TNC, here’s a series of lectures by Yale professor of history David Blight on the subject that is well worth your time. With so many ideas (should say “ideas”) sure to carelessly thrown around in the race to ‘fix the country’ and be the next white guy to lose to Obama president, Dr. Blight’s lectures put that distinctiveness of yestercentury in a solid context. Almost seems as if, far from being dead, the past isn’t even past.
Watch it on Academic Earth
This is a good point to share with your friends who tell you, while nodding, that the government should just get out of the way and let private enterprise solve today’s problems.
Burton Richter, Nobel laureate in physics
The President talked about Sputnik, which inspired the Eisenhower administration to sharply increase investment in education, and in all areas of science and technology. The President mentioned the role of government in innovation, but Congress does not seem to have appreciated what the federal role has been. Simply put, industry does not innovate; industry turns federally funded innovations into products. Nobel laureates said it in 2009. The National Academies of Sciences said it in 2010. The American Enterprise Institute, Brookings and the Breakthrough Institute said it recently in a report called “Post-Partisan Power.”
America’s corporate leaders also said it recently in a report from The American Energy Innovation Council. Every basic technology in one of the products of the decade, the iPhone (and the Blackberry before it), came from government funded research; the internet, the GPS system, large scale integrated circuits, and even the touch screen, (see “Where Good Technologies Come From“)
Without industry there would be no product. Without government funded R&D there would be no innovative technology to turn into products. To both Congress and the Administration I would say back the pieties with the funds required to realize them.
And this goes double triple Hammer time for new clean energy solutions.
Via . Earth
That is, holding two (or more) conflicting ideas in your head at one time, and a butterfly net in your hand.
So… there are personal challenges and there are challenges that leap over the millennia. And sometimes these conflate or simply come together in one person. The point is, we could all be doing a lot more; don’t let yourself off so lightly. Come on, do something. Or something else. Or else.He envisioned them coming to the New World from Asia over millions of years in a series of waves.
Few professional lepidopterists took these ideas seriously during Nabokov’s lifetime. But in the years since his death in 1977, his scientific reputation has grown. And over the past 10 years, a team of scientists has been applying gene-sequencing technology to his hypothesis about how Polyommatus blues evolved. On Tuesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, they reported that Nabokov was absolutely right.
The Economist, today:
By itself, as we always say, one hot year doesn’t prove anything. The fact that every one of the twelve hottest years on record has come since 1997 is a little harder to wave away. 2010 was also the wettest year ever, corresponding to the expectation that higher heat means more water vapour. More countries set national high-temperature records in 2010 than ever before, including the biggest one, Russia. Arctic sea ice in December was at its lowest level ever, temperatures across a broad swathe of northern Canada have been 20° C higher than normal for the past month, the record temperatures are coming despite the lowest levels of solar activity in a century and a La Nina effect that should be making Canada colder rather than warmer, and so on. It is of course possible that global warming plateaued this year; it’s also possible that it plateaued this morning. One can always hope!
Complete with a nice graph. But is this thing settled? Far from it apparently. Can’t begin to do anything that might be too expensive until every last numb-nut is convinced, every last remote possibility that nothing is happened vanquished. Then what? A study group? They don’t believe in human-caused global warming because of the same reason they don’t believe in making Medicare universal – it’s un-American. Yes, it’s that incoherent. If you think you’re reasoning with people who can be convinced, you haven’t been listening to what they have been saying. And so amateur deniers and professional politicians continue to propose cuts to clean energy, yell about business regulations strangling growth and about how the debt is the evil to end all evils.
I think Republicans believe that we can keep doing things the way we always have (only with way lower taxes) and get much the same wholesome results. It’s this point that is already frustrating them in ways, besides race, that I don’t believe have actually set it in with the folks who carry the water. And until they can openly say they don’t like the results without another of their team calling them America-haters, they just have to keep professing to love the results.
Meanwhile, ticktock… and the incremental, practically unnoticeable damage will continue until it becomes more noticeable and there’s a special Fox News report on the real news that global warming actually hurts liberals and helps Republicans. And so it must be real and irreversible. And then it finally will be.
Yay?
This, recently from JR at Climate Progress:
Humanity has only two paths forward at this point. Either we voluntarily switch to a low-carbon, low-oil, low-net water use, low-net-material use economy over the next two decades or the post-Ponzi-scheme-collapse forces us to do so circa 2030. The only difference between the two paths is that the first one spares our children and grandchildren and countless future generations untold misery (see “Intro to global warming impacts: Hell and High Water” and “A stunning year in climate science reveals that human civilization is on the precipice“).
Wedges, stabilizing the PPMs of carbon dioxide… oh, yes: preservation. Deploying all the technology and energy efficient we can means basically using what we already have. Yes, maybe boring – living closer to work, buying lighter vehicles. But only boring because we like big-budget thrillers, bells, whistlers, hookers, firetrucks, okay… bells and whistles. A lot of the shrugging is tied up in the non-existent technical conundrum that this just can’t be solved, so what is there to do besides wait for the magic science elephant to pull the solution(s) out of the trunk.
Save the unlikely scenarios for that script you should be working on. Take the low road.
What is morality? Dr. K, not mincing words.
Speaking of sustainability… Tunisia.
While I’ll defer to professor Cole for extended analysis, it’s rather glaring around the web that no one seems to know much about Tunisia, the Maghreb, or anything relevant to Le Monde Arab beyond the idiosyncratic locution of “the War on Terrorism.” I’ll add my ‘tender filings’ to the meager pile.
These actually consist of an acquaintance of a few dozen Tunisians, friendships with a few and ten days there in 2005. Tunis, the capital, is actually ancient Carthage; it’s about 90 miles from the westernmost tip of Sicily; Former French colony and so replete with period colonial layout and architecture; a deep sense of its history and of Arab culture; Islamic but largely secular; extraordinary life on the streets, especially the maze of shops and markets in la Medina of most cities. A highly educated population, a significant percentage of which is under forty. Great food, delicious wine. The seductive Arabic language. As a francophile, easy to fall in love with the place and the people.
But there are were pictures of President Ben Ali everywhere, in every single business with a door. A society secured by a police state. State controlled media. And the highly educated, multi-lingual populace was is largely without jobs or other future prospects equal to their wide-ranging abilities and expansive world views. Cafes full of smart people with no jobs. It didn’t add up, and most had understood this for a long time.
And now, as liberating as what’s going on there might sound, it is a very dark time for the people actually living there. I hope they make it through, and the army stands aside long enough for a legitimate civilian government to emerge. They’ve entered the crucible, but as the title to this post translates, they’ve had enough.
Bon vent.
If you live in a city this is all to familiar, especially in the during Northy winter-ness. You know, cut off from normal school-work routes, people… walk. Slide Ride kayaks down hillsides, of course. But out on the avenue, it’s funny to see people on foot outnumber vehicles five-to-one. It’s kinda the whole thing, in a nutshell. All brought on by a little winter.
Hey, what if this is just what you did, with all your internets and text-y gadgets? Want to see a friend? Hike over to their ipad.
