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Supreme courting

A friend and I have had several conversations recently about how much of our lives and livelihoods seems to be in the hands of 9 people, one in particular, and how little people seem to know or care about this august body.

Soon comes one of these, in the case of American Electric power vs. Connecticut:

On December 6, 2010, the Supreme Court granted certiorari in American Electric Power Co. v. Connecticut, a federal nuisance case on appeal from the Second Circuit. Plaintiffs — eight states, the City of New York and three non-profit land trusts — seek abatement and reduction of greenhouse gas emissions from defendants, who include some of the United States’ largest electric utility companies. The Second Circuit ruled that: (1) the case did not present a non-justiciable political question, (2) the plaintiffs have standing, (3) the plaintiffs stated claims under the federal common law of nuisance, (4) the plaintiffs’ claims are not displaced by the Clean Air Act (“CAA”), and, finally, (5) the Tennessee Valley Authority (“TVA”), a quasi-governmental defendant, is not immune from the suit.

The states, plus NYC and three land trusts want to be able to sue these companies spewing carbon into the air like it’s a birthright. One lower court said, “sure.” The companies appealed.

And then,

Three leading Republicans in Congress filed a brief with the Supreme Court late Monday asking the justices to overturn a lower court ruling that allowed several states and environmental groups to sue electric utilities over their global warming emissions.

You might guess who these three are. They don’t believe in AGW and routinely put a fork (or a hold on, choose your metaphor) in any legislative efforts to address the problem. Of course their amicus brief makes the claim that the issue is simply not one for the courts, which might do something; they want to preserve this right for the legislative branch, which likely will not do anything for at least a while longer, if these three have anything to do with it.

It’s a very strange meaning for preservation.

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You Can Go Green Again

Because you can’t stop being what you are. By way – though like any good thing, just barely – of having a favorite bar, and a favorite poet to meet you there, here’s a snip from Lean Down Your Ear Upon the Earth and Listen: Thomas Wolfe’s Greener Modernism by Robert Taylor Ensign.

As Jonathan Bate pointed out, “Wordsworth wrote poems about how flowers may vitalize the spirit.” Not surprisingly, then, the romantics celebrated life’s inherent and ineluctable movement in all its guises and forms. Wolfe expresses this vitalistic concept in the section of Antaeus, or A Memory of the Earth where the wife of Furman, her home having just been destroyed in a flood, yearns for an existence apart from all rivers, change, and movement: “Oh God! Just let me live where nothin’ moves! Just let me live where things will always be the same!” Nature’s movement and changes, however,  are inescapable and Wolfe underscores this universal and organic reality when Furman’s wife realizes that her consciousness continues to be lapped by the rivers of life:

I know each sound that comin’ from the River! I hear the willows trailin’ int he River! I hear oak-limbs snagged there in the River! Al my thoughts are flowin’ like the River, all my life is movin’ like the River, I think an’ talk an’ dream just like the River, as it flows by me, by me, to the sea.

Based on their notion that nature acts as a vitalizing agent, with the senses serving as the conduit, the romantics valued emotions not only because they are individualistic and subjective responses, but also because they are the signs and expressions of vitality. According to Kroeber, “Wordsworth treats emotions as the psychic manipulation of sensation, the process by which psychic activity, inner impulse, mingles and coordinates with physical sensation, the reception of stimuli from outside.” Wolfe’s writing suggests that he shared this same belief in the external, sensory-drawn origin of human emotions. Based on this belief, the romantics valued pleasurable feelings the most and “joy” in particular. Wolfe himself speaks reverently of joy: “when a person has in him the vitality of joy, it is not a meaningless extravagance to say that ‘nothing else matters.’ He is rich. It is probably the richest resource of the spirit.” The romantics viewed joy as not only being “at its highest… the sign in our consciousness of the free play of all our vital powers”, but also, according to Coleridge, as the pathway to a state of oneness with the physical world.

And so it is.

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Correspondents II

They write articles:

If you accept the notion that many more people must start growing food—for health, or even for survival—the steward-farm idea has merit. “There’s a real sweet spot at two to five acres. It’s stunning, the productivity,” says Redmond, who during this fallow time for architects and developers is contract farming on plots of that scale. But the practicality of professionals simultaneously managing individuals’ properties and their own operations remains doubtful.

Vicky Ranney, the developer of Prairie Crossing, asks, “From the point of view of the farmer, is it worthwhile for them to work with maybe 10 different owners of one-acre lots? That’s a lot of administration.” There is also the niggling problem of individualism. The original plan for Serenbe included some five-acre lots for agricultural homesteads, but these were never offered for sale. “A lot of people have the romantic idea of farming,” says the developer Steve Nygren. “We realized that if we sold a piece, we had no control over how it looked, and it could be a weed patch in five years.”

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Correspondents I

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.

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Adaptation

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.

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Southern Distinctiveness

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

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Innovation

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

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Conflicting Ideas

That is, holding two (or more) conflicting ideas in your head at one time, and a butterfly net in your hand.

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.

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.


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New Dual Suspension, Now with More Disbelief

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?

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Two Roads Diverged in Our Forest

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.