June 14, 2011
May 31, 2011
Impolitic Truths
Here's a good example of the sort of personally dangerous and often career limiting speech discussed earlier in Complicity. Two arguments for switching to renewable energy -- the depletion of fossil fuels and national security -- are no longer plausible. What about the claim that a rapid transition to wind and solar energy is necessary, to avert catastrophic global warming? The scenarios with the most catastrophic outcomes of global warming are low probability outcomes -- a fact that explains why the world’s governments in practice treat reducing CO2 emissions as a low priority, despite paying lip service to it. But even if the worst outcomes were likely, the rational response would not be a conversion to wind and solar power but a massive build-out of nuclear power. Nuclear energy already provides around 13-14 percent of the world’s electricity and nearly 3 percent of global final energy consumption, while wind, solar and geothermal power combined account for less than one...
February 17, 2011
Prehensile Lips
Anthropologists Trace Human Origins Back To One Large Goat An international team of anthropologists announced Monday it had traced the lineage of Homo sapiens back to a single large Pliocene-era goat. "We have mapped out each of the diverse branches of the human family back to the dawn of our species," Douglas Ochs of Columbia University said, "and found that the common ancestor of all living humans was an immense and cognitively advanced goat that roamed the earth 3.4 million years ago ... researchers from Australia and Japan explained how one 6-foot-tall goat with a hominid skeletal structure spawned numerous goat-human hybrids over a period of 1.8 million years. In a series of PowerPoint slides, they then showed that our ancestors used their prehensile upper lips to perform basic agricultural tasks and stomped out crude pottery with their cloven feet ... most of the scientists maintained that much of the physical evidence appeared to corroborate the goat- human connection,...
November 11, 2010
Technocrap
Echoing the sentiments of Unobtainium: You might yearn for a world of true expertise and strong but benevolent authority, but you'll have to wait until you pass to some world beyond this one to enjoy such things. Tragedy of the technocrats Simply assuming the parishioners will remain faithful, or lamenting that they ought to remain faithful, is no way to win the argument. There is something poignant, but also a little blind, in the fact that DeLong’s agitation was aroused by Robert Rubin, who, when elevated to speak ex cathedra from the pages of the Financial Times, had nothing worthwhile to say. To DeLong, Robert Rubin remains a pontiff of the “bipartisan technocrats”. To the rest of us, Rubin has become an icon of self-delusion, corruption, and arrogance. Rubin was arguably the most influential member of a technocracy whose conduct now seems deeply unwise. He accepted handsome compensation to cheerlead risktaking at a bank that then held taxpayers for...
September 03, 2010
Hollow Frogs
So long as a scholar restricts himself to some domain in which he has some amount of expertise greater than zero, and speaks in jargon, with gravitas, it is easy to assume that he is at least brighter than average. Blogging usually reveals the error of such assumptions. So, it is standard conventional wisdom that people are liberal when they're young, and conservative when they're old. To the extent that we interpret "liberal" as "eager for change" and "conservative" as "against change," this trajectory is only natural. . . But what I am really interested in here is the apparent trend where people become more conservative with respect to economic policies. In this context, the argument about familiarity does not seem to hold. In the United States, the government's economic policies have been trending more conservative for decades, and the familiarity argument would predict that older people should be, on average, more liberal. Economic policies are not trending more...
April 29, 2010
Take Note
If you had any lingering doubts about who are the violent crazies in this country, though that's difficult to imagine, this should help you grasp reality. Carlos Yu on Facebook yesterday: "What this country really needs is William Tecumseh Sherman." He went on: ... leaving a ten-mile wide trail of burned-out mobile homes and meth labs behind him, Sherman paused in his March to the Tea to regroup his forces. Water was always an issue for Sherman's armies, campaigning as they did in the dusty steppes surrounding Bakersfield, in the deserts of Arizona, and throughout the drought-stricken former Confederacy. Nowhere was their lack of water worse than among the abandoned exurban developments of central Florida, where the water table had been permanently damaged... This, I think, sums up everything admirably....
February 18, 2010
Green Goblins
A woman that I'd been seeing once pushed me through a plate glass window in a rage due to my political views that Republicans were mean and Democrats were incompetent, or the reverse, I wasn't sure which. Fortunately, religion never came up since I can be equally offensive on that subject - I have something to offend almost everyone. That was some years ago, before eco-quarrelling. Finding The One can be hard work at the best of times, but even more so when you want that special person to share a worldview that ultimately regards human beings as polluters, to be valued according to the size of their carbon footprints and their recycling track record. . . Yesterday’s edition of The Times (London) reported on environmentally-friendly couples increasingly clashing over green issues, like whose turn it is to take the recycling out, whether it’s more ethical to have a bath or a shower, or how often to switch the...
August 11, 2009
Tin Foil Time
The dominant political narratives are utterly disengaged from reality. This isn't novel, it has perhaps always been so, but it may be that the consequences of such behavior are becoming graver. . . . the Group of 8 leaders decreed last month that the planet’s average temperature shall not rise more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit above today’s level. But what if Mother Earth didn’t get the memo? How do we stay cool in the future? Two options: Plan A. Keep talking about the weather. This has been the preferred approach for the past two decades in Western Europe, where leaders like to promise one another that they will keep the globe cool by drastically reducing carbon emissions. Then, when their countries’ emissions keep rising anyway, they convene to make new promises and swear that they really, really mean it this time. Plan B. Do something about the weather. Originally called geoengineering, this approach used to be dismissed as science...
August 06, 2009
Brain Washing
They really are this insane. an effort to shape an initiative for curbing emissions would have a higher chance of success if it considered research showing which messages and incentives cause people to change, or resist change. “We must look at the reasons people are not acting in order to understand how to get people to act,” Janet Swim, a psychology professor at Penn State and the task force leader, said in a statement. The report reviews research on the behavioral element in every part of the climate problem — from consumer habits to the human tendency to give outsize importance to immediate costs even when confronted with evidence of big long-term risks. In essence, as this report and many previous studies show, the human mind appears to be set up in the worst possible way to grasp and act on global warming, which is one of those problems where the most damaging outcomes are somewhere and someday, not...
July 15, 2009
Math Camp
Go figure. The 38 remaining Annex 1 countries produce 15bn tonnes of CO2, or 51% of global emissions. Were they to do as the UK proposes, cutting this total by 80% and offsetting half of it, they would have to buy reductions equal to 20% of the world's total carbon production. This means that other countries would need to cut 42% of their emissions just to absorb our carbon offsets. But the G8 has also adopted another of the UK's targets: a global cut of 50% by 2050. Fifty per cent of world production is 14.6bn tonnes. If the Annex 1 countries reduce their emissions by 80% (including offsets), they will trim global output by 12bn tonnes. The other countries must therefore find further cuts of 2.6bn tonnes. Added to the offsets they've sold, this means that their total obligation is 8.6bn tonnes, or 60% of their current emissions. So here's the outcome. The rich nations, if they follow...
June 28, 2009
Mediocrity
One of the disappointments of increasing interconnection is the realization that so many of those in positions of influence are so meagerly endowed. The House bill contains a provision, inserted in the middle of the night before Friday’s vote, which requires the president, starting in 2020, to impose a “border adjustment” — or tariff — on certain goods from countries that do not act to limit their global warming emissions. The bottom line is that Waxman-Markey, as it currently stands, would in fact be counterproductive, once the international scale of the problem is taken into account. That we learn about this provision only now is startling enough. I write this all as someone who a) favors a much higher price for fossil fuels, b) thinks that if micro-nutrients are a good idea they are not an alternative to addressing climate change; we could do both with positive expected long-run return, c) thinks that many people on the "Right" oppose...
June 11, 2009
Political Comedy
We seem to have elected clowns. FEMA is attempting to do the impossible, and that is to predict future flood losses in a way that will allow changes to be made in the federal flood insurance program. . . Once again I am reminded about a vignette from Nobel Prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow (PDF): As a weather forecaster in the Second World War, Arrow and his colleagues were told that their commanding officer needed a long-term forecast. The forecasters knew from experience that such forecasts had little scientific basis, and related this up the chain of command. The reply that came back was this: no matter, the general needs the forecast for planning purposes. What worries me is that I suspect that "intellectuals" who were so scathingly critical of FEMA in the past will find current efforts to be admirable....
June 07, 2009
Amateur Engineering
I suspect this is an example of someone having a notion and then looking for excuses to do it. Would you believe me if I told you, that we now have the advanced technology to safely scrub a minimum of (one) billion tons of carbon out of our atmosphere, to cool and rehydrate our dying planet, year after year after year? . . . Gone are the “monsoons of old” . . . We can bring back the pre-industrial “monsoons of old” and re-establish the continuity our planet needs to correctly sequence between contrasts. . . We remove any barrier that blocks the ocean’s ability to F – L – O – W into/onto the desert land below sea level. . . Deserts which consumes approximately (one / third) of the earth’s surface – without water – are bastions for suffering and are basically useless. . . As the oceans continue to rise due to ice melt, the vast...
June 02, 2009
Punk Politics
The post is nonsensical conspiracy theory rubbish, but I may steal from this graf in future. You can fight the permanent national security apparatus and get nothing in return other than a reputation as a giant pussy existential threat to America who is going destroy us all, or you can let the apparatus publicly act like you’re in charge of it while it more or less runs itself, allowing you to focus on the trivial issues you care about, like nationalizing things and raising taxes. Cheney wiping the floor with Obama over torture is a sad sign that it’s all still just churning along. The message, I take it, is that the damn hippy kids can appoint bisexual robot Latinas to the Supreme Court and tell GM to make cars that run on fairy kisses as long as they know the Serious People will continue to control the power that matters. All signs point to Obama going along, which,...
May 02, 2009
April 22, 2009
The Fix
Is in. Risk Management Solutions (RMS) is a leading company that provides catastrophe models which are used to asses risk in the insurance and reinsurance industries. . . A key part of RMS short-term prediction of hurricane activity is an expert elicitation. . . The RMS elicitation has been controversial because it has resulted in a short-term prediction of activity higher than the climatological average, which means higher risk, and for coastal property owners the result is higher insurance rates. In 2006 for example the elicitation by the RMS panel of experts resulted in a prediction of 0.92 Category 3-4-5 storms making landfall every year for the period 2007 to 2011, which is considerably higher than the 1950-2006 average of 0.64. At the time, loss estimates increased by about 40%, with consequences for insurance and reinsurance rates. . . I created a panel of 5 “monkeys” by allocating weights randomly across the 20 models for each of my participating...
April 21, 2009
Long Snooze
Here's an idea: the idea behind The Long News: to try to identify news stories whose significance seems likely to grow, rather than diminish, over time. We will link to articles about trends, discoveries, and events that might have a long term impact on humanity — or at least, for several decades. We will try to spot stories which appear likely to shape the future, and that a future historian might some day look back upon as important. OK, so it's not original, or even particularly interesting. But it is being done, so far, in an unusually incompetent way. Consider the second of four future shaping stories: Given the resources each new American consumes, this story (found by Stuart Candy) is troubling: Baby boomlet: US births in 2007 break 1950s record Well, resource consumption is irrelevant when we think of long futures, since it is directly related to technological development, and only the most foolish try to predict that....
March 27, 2009
Sam Shrugged
Humans are wired to see patterns in random noise. If you were a closet Randian and wanted to discredit big government for generations by running it into the ground, in what ways would you act differently from the Obama Administration so far? The combination of grandiose promises and inept execution, and the repeated elevation of tax cheats to high office, certainly argues in favor of that analysis. Intellectual bankruptcy and incompetence are sufficient to explain the events. You get what you manage for whether you understand what that will be or not. Update: Quoting The Instapundit can have consequences Hello to thousands of people....
March 25, 2009
Long Doom
Just sayin' Surprisingly there are collapsitarians who are rooting for the quick arrival of the Long Doom. Perhaps not surprisingly they come in all kinds of flavors. Some hail from the hard wingnut left, some from the hard wingnut right, and some from next door. As far as Google knows the term collapsitarian was coined by Jim Kunstler in a January 26, 2009 New Yorker article on Dystopians. There seem to be about six species of collapsitarians: Luddites, anarchists, and anti-civilization activists (see The Unabomber Was Right) who are trying the hasten collapse as soon as possible. Goldbugs, survivalists, Y2K holdouts, and slightly right wingers who see collapse as the penalty for modern liberalism. Conservationists and greenies who see collapse as the penalty for environmental sins. Somewhat leftist anti-globalists who see collapse as the penalty for globalism. Critics of American super-power who see the collapse of America as an inevitable imperial overreach. Many are native academics, many reside outside...
March 18, 2009
Aaay!
Lemonade. Maybe we’d like to think that there are Big Chiefs with scalpels and tweezers for fingers, but the fact is Big Chiefs have hams for hands. If the economy is a glassed-in ant colony and a recession is a confusion of non-connecting tunnels then “corrective” government intervention is banging the glass with a fat fist, like Fonzie banging a Jukebox. . .Mostly you get disoriented ants. Ham handedness is good enough for politics and academics, but reality requires wisdom and finesse....
March 15, 2009
Do The Hustle
If we didn't pay for this stuff we would call it vandalism. Every one of the Stimulus, Reform, Recovery, Correction, Relief, Equity, Protection and Prevention Acts contains hundreds of pages of tax law changes. My favorite is the Heartland, Habitat, Harvest & Horticulture Act of 2008, which changes the depreciation rules for race horses. We have reviewed them all and are prepared to take you through this complex mess. It’s not that confusing after you remove the exceptions to the exceptions. OK, vandalism is too mild. It's organized crime. Byzantine....
March 12, 2009
Zingers
Professor Luigi Zingales says: Keynesianism has conquered the hearts and minds of politicians and ordinary people alike because it provides a theoretical justification for irresponsible behaviour. Medical science has established that one or two glasses of wine per day are good for your long-term health, but no doctor would recommend a recovering alcoholic to follow this prescription. Unfortunately, Keynesian economists do exactly this. They tell politicians, who are addicted to spending our money, that government expenditures are good. And they tell consumers, who are affected by severe spending problems, that consuming is good, while saving is bad. In medicine, such behaviour would get you expelled from the medical profession; in economics, it gives you a job in Washington. Peter Klein writes: Zingales’s description applies equally well to the 1930s and 1940s, when the Keynesian consensus emerged. It’s important to remember that massive deficit spending to “cure” the Depression began with Hoover and Roosevelt in the early 1930s, long before...
February 06, 2009
Ugly Stuff
The problem is politics. . . . does anyone think that pants-wetting op-eds by Presidents and Nobel Prize-winning economists can perpetuate or deepen a downturn? Yes! For example, people like the President or Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman who believe that countercyclical macroeconomic policy works largely by manipulating consumer and investor psychology. If you don’t think Obama and Krugman’s confidence-destroying disaster forecasts hurt, then you probably shouldn’t accept confidence-restoration theories of stimulus, either. We are ruled by morons. Our system has degenerated to the point that it is only open to morons. Government is far too big. The problem isn't only that it's a poor way to operate a society, the least effective method, it is also that such power attracts bad people just as a carcass on the plains draws carrion eaters. The larger the carcass the more vicious the carrion eaters it attracts. . . and we are the rotting carcass. We really need to move past...
January 09, 2009
Depression Hurts
There are those who are voicing strong objections. According to a report just released by the Congressional Budget Office (CBO), “the [federal budget] deficit this year will total $1.2 trillion, or 8.3 percent of GDP.” This seems about right for a banana republic. The bad news is that neither commercial banana cultivation nor a republican form of government has proved viable in this country. Bananas, of course, must be imported into this country from Latin America and other places where their commercial cultivation has proved profitable. As for the republican form of government, the American people have progressively repudiated it almost from the time they won their independence from the British Empire, and during the past century, they have increasingly favored a form of electoral dictatorship cum empire in which, every four years, the people cast ballots for one of the candidates put forward by the two wings of the one-party political apparatus. This system, vigorously promoted by the...
December 28, 2008
Just Because
Government policy is not just a blunt instrument, it's a toy instrument, a nerf bat, a ceremonial symbol of no value if it has to actually be used. I don't mean that it can't do great harm - we have all of history to provide examples of that - I mean that it can't do good, can't deal with real problems. But, in a bureaucratic world the response to every serious issue is to kick it upstairs. Not my yob, every underling says, and we are all underlings. The problem is that the penthouse is occupied by sociopaths who don't give a crap about anything but their own well being. It could not be otherwise since any honest and caring person would soon be destroyed by the realization of their inadequacy to the task, their inability to deal with the problems kicked upstairs to them. I think that this may be why actors and confidence men do well in...
December 19, 2008
Stocking Stuffer
For your green buddies. The system consists of a personal techno-garter -- inspired by the Opus Dei cilice popularized in Dan Brown's Davinci Code -- worn on the thigh, communicating wirelessly to a set of low-power sensors measuring the wearer's personal energy consumption. If the wearer's electricity use exceeds a certain limit, the device plunges stainless-steel thorns into the wearer's thigh, a reminder of their complicity in the planet's demise, and perhaps their own mortality. Techno-wimps. In the day we made do with self scourging. OTOH, there should be some green jobs manufactured for the manufacture and maintenance of these conspicuous consumption gadgets. Gore needs one, but it should be the necklace version....
December 09, 2008
Nutty Fears
It takes one to fear one? A peanut on the floor of a school bus leading to evacuation and decontamination for fear that it might be eaten by the 10 year old passengers, and schools declaring themselves "nut free" by banning nuts, peanut butter, homebaked goods and any foods without ingredient labels, are just some examples cited in this article. According to Professor Nicolas Christakis from Harvard Medical School, there is no evidence that any of these extreme restrictions work better than more circumscribed policies or that they are worth the money and disruptions they create. In the US, 150 people die each year from food allergies. This is compared to the 50 who die from bee stings, the 100 who die from lightening strikes, the 45,000 who die in motor vehicle accidents, and the 10,000 who are hospitalised for traumatic brain injury from playing sport. But these issues do not incur such extreme reactions, such as calling for...
December 05, 2008
Green Gifts
More holiday spirit. Dear Ethan, Every year I give the gift of a goat to Africa, on the basis that a goat provides poor Africans with milk, cheese, grass-grazing skills, and company during those long, TV-less nights in the jungle – and it also helps them to continue living sustainable, machine-free lives. Yet now Animal Aid tells us it is wrong to give animals to Africans at Christmas time, because these beasts ‘add to rather than diminish poverty’, and what’s more ‘where impoverished people cannot afford to feed and care for their animals, those animals endure extreme suffering and die’. Aaah! I don’t want my paid-for goat to suffer at the hands of some witless African! Ethan, what should I do? Keep giving the goats – or rein them in? Peaches Ciccone West London Dear Peaches, . . . it is too risky to entrust animals to a continent where the RSPCA has very little clout and where PETA...
November 15, 2008
Semi-Literate
As noted in the earlier post Traction much of the economic mumbo-jumbo we hear is fruitless wanking since it isn't grounded in reality. I agree with every word of this: A lot of this talk has an air of socialistic hubris about it. If this line of thinking were correct and the primary impediment to the production of technological miracles was a lack of government leverage, then state-owned enterprises would have been a smashing success. In reality, outside of a relatively narrow range of utility-type activities, they’ve been flops. If the negative externalities associated with carbon emissions were correctly priced, I’m quite sure that would lead people in various places to develop lower emissions cars. But is just sort of pointing at GM’s engineers and telling them “make low-emissions cars!” really going to lead to the intended result? But the intended result is meaningless. Lower emission cars are of no more value to society than glow-in-the-dark fish. They're a...
November 06, 2008
Turbulence
More about "rationality ruin". There are two versions of American exceptionalism. American-American exceptionalism is “we’re richer because we’re better.” European-American exceptionalism is “you’re better because you’re richer.” Both sides agree on exceptionalism, and just see different causes and implications. The Europeans expect us, on account of our wealth, to live up to (their) ideals, while we think that our wealth ought to prove to them that our ideals are better than theirs. No one of any importance seems to think that the United States is a normal country. Oh, what confusion lies ahead! Yes, especially since within each of these irrational ideals lurk a multitude of ideals. No good can come of this....
October 24, 2008
Briefly
I'm not here, I'm too busy to post, but this bit of insanity is good for a laugh. Ed Milliband, the new Secretary for State on Energy and Climate Change, committed the UK to cutting greenhouse-gas emissions by 80% by 2050. This tough new target was based on evidence produced by Lord Turner's Committee on Climate Change. . . The G8 plan aims to cut global emissions by 50% by 2050, and then hold emissions constant. Writing in the journal Environmental Research Letters, House and her colleagues show that under this scenario atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations will continue to rise despite the cut in emissions. The model suggests that by 2100, carbon-dioxide concentrations could be as high as 590 parts per million (ppm) and global temperatures could be as much as 3.1°C above pre-industrial levels. And by 2300, the worst-case scenario shows that carbon-dioxide levels could be 980 ppm with an accompanying rise in global temperature of 5.7°C. Things look...
October 02, 2008
Scare Stories
I'm often puzzled by the scare stories of activists. I understand that fear mongering can disrupt thought processes and trigger emotional reactions, and that dark siders use this as leverage to achieve their nefarious objectives, but the stories are so obviously false that it's a wonder that the listeners don't more often just laugh at the silly notions in them. "We are the most dangerous species of life on the planet, and every other species, even the earth itself, has cause to fear our power to exterminate." At least that's how Wallace Stegner, American novelist and environmentalist, puts it. And it certainly seems to be the word on the street in a lot of other places these days. Humans are at fault for everything under the sun - figuratively and maybe literally. I don't disagree we can do better but, for the sake of humanity, someone needs to stick up for us. Humans are the only species in 4.8...
September 22, 2008
Loose Minds
David Friedman ponders something I've observed but only had anecdotal support for. Religions serve at least two purposes, both important to humans. One is to help make sense of physical reality, explain (for instance) why living things appear to be brilliantly engineered creations. The other is to make sense of life, to answer questions about what we ought to be doing and why. . . Science did not, however, provide an alternative for the second function. People responded, I think, in one of two ways. One was to retain a serious belief in the religion and reject those parts of modern science that they found inconsistent with it—in its more extreme form, the fundamentalist option. The other was to give up serious belief in the religion and adopt some substitute: Environmentalism, Liberal politics, Marxism (as in "liberation theology"), Objectivism, New Age superstitions. . . Two recent events started me again thinking about this situation. One was a conversation with...
August 17, 2008
Euro-Cult
Nick "I’m damned if I can see an alternative to despair" Cohen takes Charles The Dim to task for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe. Marie Antoinette never said: 'Let them eat cake' to the poor of her day, but Prince Charles was adamant that today's poor should eat organic. Despite all I have read by him over the years, it was still a shock to listen to the recording of the interview he gave the Daily Telegraph. This raging man, who searched for apocalyptic predictions of catastrophe, was not a street preacher at Hyde Park Corner, but our next head of state. 'Millions of small farmers all over the world are being driven off their land into unsustainable, unmanageable, degraded and dysfunctional conurbations of unmentionable awfulness,' he cried. Soon we will face 'the absolute destruction of everything'. Of everything, your highness? Yes, and another thing! If agribusinesses think they are going to prevent absolute destruction by using 'one form of...
June 06, 2008
Venture Socialism
As the left continues to unravel the air is filled with the keening of the abandoned lamenting the loss of cherished illusions. If you want a sign of how far the yardposts have been moved, look at how carefully John McCain has had to maneuver on the subject of torture so as to not offend his political base, despite his own alleged opposition to Administration policy. Whatever comes next, however much of the damage can be repaired (by whomever the next national leadership might be), this change will make me sad for the rest of my life. There’s no easy retreat from knowing that a lot of the people around you are willing to sanction torture and are indifferent about the guilt or innocence of those subjected to it. That's a bit over the top - or perhaps under the bottom. I doubt that there are large numbers of people who are "indifferent about the guilt or innocence" of...
May 22, 2008
Green Goblins
As it becomes ever more obvious that greens are part of the problem, not the solution, narratives are being revised in an attempt to salvage some dignity. Just one problem. Winning the war on global warming requires slaughtering some of environmentalism's sacred cows. We can afford to ignore neither the carbon-free electricity supplied by nuclear energy nor the transformational potential of genetic engineering. We need to take advantage of the energy efficiencies offered by urban density. We must accept that the world's fastest-growing economies won't forgo a higher standard of living in the name of climate science — and that, on the way up, countries like India and China might actually help devise the solutions the planet so desperately needs. Wrong answer. Replacing a raft of nonsense narratives with another equally nonsensical narrative, however grand in scope, is no help. The argument seems to be a replay or spin-off of Stewart Brand's environmental heresies position of a couple of...
May 08, 2008
Gadget Pr0n
Got $10K to burn? The Micro Fueler, a backyard fueling station, can create pure E100 ethanol from sugar feed stock. “It’s third-grade science,” says Thomas Quinn, founder and CEO of E-Fuel. “You just mix together water, sugar and yeast, and in a few hours, you start getting ethanol.” The $9995 Micro Fueler has a can fill its own 35-gallon tank in about a week by fermenting the sugar, water and yeast internally, then separating out the water through a membrane filter. E-Fuel representatives claim that the initial cost of the machine can be offset by up to 50 percent by federal, state and local credits, and the cost of raw sugar can be brought down to $1 or below through a system of carbon trading coupons. The Micro Fueler can produce a gallon of ethanol from about 10 gallons of sugar. OK, it makes no economic or environmental sense, but some people blow that kind of cash on worse...
April 30, 2008
Freakish Weather
So to speak. No meteorologist or television station kept records of what they predicted, nor compared their predictions to actual results over a long term. No meteorologist posts their accuracy statistics on their résumé. No station managers use accuracy statistics in the hiring or evaluation of their meteorologists. Instead, the focus is on charm, charisma, and presentation. Their words say they care about accuracy, but their actions say they do not. Robin Hanson asks: Why should we expect this to be any better for other kinds of news? If viewers can watch the same person day after day making predictions about something they care about and personally verify day after day, and still not care much about accuracy relative to looks and charm, how much can we really expect people to care about accuracy of news on unrest in Thailand, the credit crisis, or a new medical study? Can we really expect people to track the accuracy of advice...
March 25, 2008
Green Tards
Consider the biofuels backlash. The British government’s top environmental advisers had some choice words on the recent push for more biofuels. Bob Watson, chief scientific adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, warned of a “perverse outcome” saying “If one started to use biofuels…and in reality that policy led to an increase in greenhouse gases rather than a decrease, that would obviously be insane, . . . WSJ’s Environmental Capital thinks that rolling back biofuel mandates could be good for the environment and might even be politically appealing. But they simultaneously point out that the biofuel surge has been credited by some as shaving as much as 15 percent off the cost of oil. Additionally, with so much bipartisan support for biofuels in the U.S., it seems unlikely that the American voters would embrace a sudden desertion of an industry pegged as a solution to global warming and energy independence. In fact, the “insane” and “profoundly...
February 12, 2008
Grey Moon
I didn't think that anything could surprise Robin Hanson. At the SETI conference last week I was surprised to hear NASA's Chris McKay suggest we look for dinosaur relics on the moon. . . From McKay's 1996 paper "Time for intelligence on other planets": It is now considered probable that the dinosaurs were not the lumbering clods of urban myth but that they were biochemically and behaviorally as sophisticated as present mammals. Evidence continues to point to parentling and social behavior that is on a par wit small mammals and birds. ... [Considero] the small carnivorous dinosaur Stenonychosaurus, which stood about 120cm, weighed about 40 kg, and had [a brain size ratio] about equal to that of a possum or an octopus, and lived over 12 million years before the end of the dinosaurs. ... One might speculate that perhaps Stenonychosaurus or her progeny did build radio telescopes, but their civilization was destroyed by some internal or external catastrophe....
February 01, 2008
Chilling Cthulhiana
Or, climate change and the Necronomicon. A new study by scientists has suggested that zombie attacks might increase if the current projections of global warming are realized. “If the earth gets warmer, it means longer springs, summers, and falls, and shorter winters,” said John Carpenter-Romero, Ph.D., a zombie-ologist who co-authored the study. “And shorter winters means more time for the undead to prey on the populace.” Dr. Harrister, the other co-author, and head of Zombie Robotics at Wayward Robot, Inc., explained that cold winters typically stalled the walking dead. “It is well known that zombies can’t operate in cold weather. It freezes their brains.” The pair calculated a 32.782412% increase in zombie attacks if CO2 increased to twice its pre-industrial rate. “Clearly, this is a very troubling result,” said Dr. Harrister, “If we don’t do something soon, the streets will be filled with blood.” I hadn't considered that. Recent efforts to involve more statisticians in decision making could better...
January 23, 2008
The End
The lunatics have escaped the asylum. [via Prometheus] Liberal democracy is sweet and addictive and indeed in the most extreme case, the USA, unbridled individual liberty overwhelms many of the collective needs of the citizens. . . There must be open minds to look critically at liberal democracy. Reform must involve the adoption of structures to act quickly regardless of some perceived liberties. . . We are going to have to look how authoritarian decisions based on consensus science can be implemented to contain greenhouse emissions. Pielke asks: So whenever you hear (or invoke) an argument from expertise (i.e., "the experts tell us that we must ...") ask if we should listen to the experts in just this one case, or if we should turn over all decisions to experts. If just this one case, why this one and not others? If a general prescription, should we do away with democracy in favor of an authoritarianism of expertise? Discuss....
January 21, 2008
Reality Gap
The earlier post Terraforming Gap noted the bizarre anxieties from an outpost of the climate change millennial movement. Here's another. We should fight like hell, but no matter what, we're going to have at least the consequences of a seriously altered climate to deal with. Thought that's true, I dislike the term adaptation. First, it seems to imply to me that we actually can adapt to climate change, that we can move smoothly from being people who live in this climate to people who live in that one. But we don't know what that climate will be like, or even if it will be a stable-but-different climate or an oscillating pattern of various weird climates. We have never had a stable climate. It's an oxymoron. Climate always changes and that's a good thing since otherwise our world would be dead, a frozen clinker, a space rock. Humans have been adapting to climate change all along. In fact, some experts...
January 07, 2008
Terraforming Gap
See this report from an outpost of the climate change millennial movement. Rumors abound that the militaries and intelligence services of a variety of great power countries have, in the past, worked on dubious approaches to weather control. The idea of a geoengineering arms race may superficially parallel this line of thinking, but it's actually a very different concept. Unlike "weather warfare," geoengineering would be more subtle and long-term, and would have nothing to do with steering hurricanes or inducing local droughts; moreover, unlike weather control, we know it can work, since we've been unintentionally changing the climate for decades. Geoengineering as a military strategy would appear to offer a variety of benefits. Research can be done out in the open, taking advantage of civilian work on anti-global warming geoengineering ideas. If my argument that nuclear weapons and open-source warfare have made conventional warfare essentially obsolete is correct, climate-based warfare would offer an alternative non-nuclear weapon, one that would...
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