Who is responsible for Global Warming?

The idea of "carbon offsets" irks me. The idea that creating a market in pollution allowances will have much impact on pollution is a snow job and an escape hatch for industries and consumers who just don't want to do their share. We have had the money to buy oil and burn coal. Now, to repair that, we are going to, (guess what!), yep, buy the oil and the coal and the "credits" invented out of thin air and assigned to someone who pollutes less than we do? In spirit, it appeals to me about as much as the idea that some poor schnook has volunteered to be my carbon whipping boy. Saving the world from overheating is first and foremost a battle to reduce consumption and the fair way to do that would be for every consumer to reduce their consumption.

Its just too simple to do: Less oil burned would be more greenhouse gas reduction. Period. "I can afford not to suffer, I can pay to spare myself any inconvenience." is the simple retort but it is not voiced at an honest volume, not while there are shell games for greenhouse gasses.

The New York Times takes a quick survey of experts on the legitimacy of claimed benefits for the environment and all but calls the whole carbon offsets market a sham. The best quote in the article hits at the heart of why we are stalling: human inertia and the pathetic habit of confusing what you have with what you are.

Michael R. Solomon, the author of “Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having and Being” and a professor at Auburn University, said he was not surprised by the allure of the carbon-offsetting market.
“Consumers are always going to gravitate toward a more parsimonious solution that requires less behavioral change,” he said. “We know that new products or ideas are more likely to be adopted if they don’t require us to alter our routines very much.”
But he said there was danger ahead, “if we become trained to substitute dollars for deeds — kind of an ‘I gave at the office’ prescription for the environment.”

There is not much beside curmudgeonhood that I have in common with Boston Globe Columnist, Alex Beam but when he rails against transferring to others the onus of any task or responsibility we ought to share just because we can afford to, I sympathize. Any solution Milton Friedman would approve of warrants severe scrutiny for its effects on the weakest players in the market, especially when the weakest of those players is actually the weather. The weather will hurt the poorest of us the worst. The people who put the most money in their pocket as a consequence of enabling us all to dirty the skies should not be allowed to buy their way out of the mess using the money we have made...that is potentially a runaway positive feedback of power. Until pollution credits are mandatory and costly enough to be punitive they are a smokescreen for business as usual.

how to heat your house without heating your planet

The Insufferable Carbon Snob went green on domestic heating decades ago...way back when Jimmy Carter and OPEC in their very different ways, stressed the importance of using less oil.
Greensmile has given you an earful of the financial and moral dimensions to heedless consumption of fossil fuels...plenty of fodder for future posts. But ICS wants you to think about the money today. Abandoning fuelish ways by switching to housing that is better insulated and uses carbon neutral heat sources is only expensive in the short term. Here is one family's response to global warming and peak oil.

If you can't afford to do the right things about energy use, you are in the wrong place.

So quit making excuses 'cause YOUR world is broken and you CAN fix it. To put this haughty bit of moralizing in the economic framework some of you might respond to: If you can't afford to do the right things about energy use now, what makes you think it is going to get easier to afford to shift to greener ways later on? You are adrift and headed for the falls. Unless the energy companies that sponsor the present US administration can be convinced that it is in their interest to do something beside move armies and earth to bring you yet more oil and coal to burn, it will be entirely up to us fat-assed consumers to make the changes.

You may find moralizing on sustainability issues tedious. Too obvious, too self-righteous, so much easier to say than to do...etc. Stow it. I have not yet begun to preach. I may slip into a hortatory tone out of habit now and then but pay it no mind. Today, just keep an eye on your checkbook. Here is one way to keep heating costs down and net carbon emissions low as well.

It took us 17 years to pay off all the mortgages. It would have been longer if the "conventional" heat sources had been used.

Building inspectors are conservative in my experience but the really dangerous discouragement comes from the lenders. They demand a conventional heat source to insure the sale of your house should you fail to make payments. If you take out a construction loan for the building phase, lenders dole the money out according to a fixed sequence of completion steps that may not match the increments of expenditure for a solar heated house...you make up the difference.

About 25 years ago we were ready for a bigger house and could not find a contemporary we liked. We decided to build. The plans began with the idea that we should be able to get most of our heat from the sun. The first thing you do then is site the house with most of its glass facing south and with the greatest thermal mass you can accommodate. Water is superior for this purpose, having a higher specific heat than any common building material. All the better if you can swim in your heat sink once in a while:Facing due west, a view of the glass wall and 50,000 gallons of thermal mass.

To make any design work, you must do a heat budget. Being handy with software, I wrote a program that could estimate the heat lost by various designs and various choices of construction materials. It is essentially a software model of a house based on the blueprints. This allows you to know how big a heat source you will need. My numbers were in the range of 30000 BTU/hr in worst winter conditions. That means a 50000 BTU/hr wood stove will suffice.

Most tables that give a way to compare your heating options only apply to conventional construction so you will have to find one that accounts for the amount of insulation you want to put into your house. The table linked is from a Canadian source and would be appropriate for conventional housing stock, not applicable to super insulated nor to solar heating. Many of the books on designing solar heated houses that I bought were written right after the "oil shock" of 1973. Since then we went back to driving trucks to get our lattes and many of those books never saw a second edition. There are a few attractive new books reviewed at this site but the one with the best table of contents is unknown to Amazon. This book claims to have the software for figuring out if your design will work for solar heating your house but I have not read it. To name one book that I like [it has worked examples for our part of the country]: The Solar Home Book by Bruce Anderson, of which no revisions were made since 1976. The core piece of the design task is to add up the contribution to heat loading for each square foot of your house's surface based on the R-value of the walls, windows, roof etc. and figure out how much sun will come through the windows. Vertical glazing is the simplest and works better than sloped because you don't swelter in the summer. The design we have works at its best when the weather is at its coldest with snow on the deck reflecting additional heat into the house:

The romance goes out of wood heat pretty quickly. Its dirty and it always snows when you need to go out to the woodpile for another load. Its far more work and far better exercise than turning up a thermostat. So I never bought a membership at a gym. It is only when there have been two cloudy days back to back that there is any need for the stove. Here in grinding detail are formulas to compute heating costs for wood and comparisons to oil and electric heat. But the important thing is not how you heat but how much heat you keep. Before you do any other thing to reduce oil consumption, insulate your house well. With R-30 walls and an R-40 roof, just the sun alone warms the air over the pool strongly. We simply open windows between the solarium and the living quarters to let a convection current do what blowers, furnaces and duct work do in our neighbors houses. The picture below shows a pink postit suspended by a thread from the yellow thumbtack wafting in the warm current of air. That crude tell-tale is all the technology we use to control when to open or close "for solar". It is of course an utterly silent means of heating.
The bottom line for us is about $500/yr in delivered cord wood heats our 4000sq ft house where our neighbors are paying about 2000 to $2400 per season for oil depending on how big their house is. The performance of course depends on the sun but it is generally quite gratifying. Our coldest weather is dry and windy and often sunny. Winter days when it is below freezing outside and we wake to a 65 degree house, light no fire and go to bed in a 75 degree house feel like a perpetual bonus.

The carbon we put back in the air came out of the air. In that sense, wood burning is carbon neutral if you don't truck the wood from far away. I get it when building lots are being cleared in my neighborhood and split it by hand so fuel burnt to fetch fuel is at an absolute minimum. We recycle the ashes as a fertilizer ingredient in our compost and as ice-melt on the driveway.

If you own, getting insulation is money well spent. If you can remodel to put larger well insulated windows on the sunny side of your house, it can pay you back nicely. If you are smart or lucky enough to be building now that the deflating housing market has made good carpenters available, you should just say "screw resale value" and build yourself a house you will actually enjoy and feel good about.

If you just talk about global warming and blame everything on Detroit, Exxon and Bush, STFU. Demand better choices and make better choices.

Take Back The Blog

You don't even know for sure if I am a man or a woman.
I am a blogger.
That ought to be enough.
But the same pinched little minds that keep women off the street or out of the office want them off the Internet...for no better reason than that they are women
I am supporting Take Back The Blog.

Feat of Clay

The closest I come to idolizing any person is generally a pretty tepid endorsement. These persons tend to be intellectual rock stars of the day, authors or scientists...and lately, a blogger or two. And my "reasons" for the not entirely reasonable adulation are of two sorts. Either there was selflessness and courage shown in putting forth their ideas in spite of convention and censorship or they really made me think. Making me think is not hard, I do it all the time if only in shallow ways on a bewildering menagerie of topics. But when there is, to me, a new idea or new information on an interest of mine, I am grateful for the stimulation. When diverse topics are pulled together, it delights me. That is how Thomas L Friedman got on my list of favorites: I know how much education played a part in the financial well being and interesting work I now enjoy and I know the small and individual stories of our educations somehow grow out of policies and priorities set by states and cities but come to work as important forces in the economic well being of entire nations. I appreciated his feat of always knitting those threads together for readers.

An op-ed piece of Friedman's in the New York Times this morning titled China needs an Einstein, so do we for which I have the cookie and you probably do not, goes on in the following fashion about Isaacson's new biography of Einstein:

“The whole theme of the last century, and of Einstein’s life,” Mr. Isaacson said in an interview, “is about people who fled oppression in order to go places to think and express themselves. Einstein runs away from the rote learning and authoritarianism of Germany as a teenager in the 1890s and goes to Italy and Switzerland. And then he flees Hitler to come to America, where he resists both McCarthyism and Stalinism because he believes that the only way to have creativity and imagination is to nurture free thought — rebellious free thought.”

In the simplifying and optimistic sweep of Mr. Friedman's theme here, I am now hearing a flip side of Dubya's moronic "they hate us for our freedom". Friedman seems to say Fortune has smiled on us and raised our IQs and incomes because it loves our freedom. I do not think that is an entirely wrong appreciation of the advantages of the nation we aspire to be. But it is an oversimplification that might keep us from addressing the gaps between reality and aspiration.

Have I put words in Mr Friedman's mouth here? That may be, but consider the facts that are glossed over in the article.

• Einstein wound up in Italy while still in school because his father's business failed and the family moved to Italy where the father took up the management of a factory for electrical machinery. He did not personally run away to Italy, no matter how ill-suited to the stifling German educational model his temperament may have been.
• By the time Hitler drove Einstein and many other intellectuals from Europe to America, Einstein's great creative works were ten years in the past. He actually produced his first brilliant work while marking time in a Swiss patent office because he could not get a teaching position in universities. That ostracizing of an already renowned intellect would have been the observation for Friedman to hang his theme on.
• He renounced his German citizen ship to avoid the draft. Had he been a young man in America in the late 1960's, we might be writing about a Canadian citizen. That would not suit Friedman's argument at all.
• He was in and out of half a dozen European universities from 1908 onward and would do his greatest research before finally settling in Germany where he was not exactly the anti-establishment. As a professor at the University of Berlin and a director of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute for Physics until 1932, many of his papers were not circulated outside of Germany and its WWI allies.

Let us hope China has all its wars with other nations, cold or not, behind it. If so, the kinds of military and world political pressures that kept some of Einstein's work out of the hands of the world science community are not in effect there. Mrs Greensmile gives India better odds of having the next Einstein and the next Silicon Valley. I never bet against Mrs. Greensmile.

Freedom, its just not that simple.

The rest of Mr. Friedman's piece is devoted to his concern that where the Chinese snuff out imagination in some vague way via political supression of dissent, there is some incompetance or lack in the usual treatments of science in American schools which likewise kill scientific imagination. Says Mr. Friedman:

My favorite Einstein quotation is that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” A society that restricts imagination is unlikely to produce many Einsteins — no matter how many educated people it has.

After reading one of Coturnix posts on what an education he got in Serbia, I would agree strongly with Friedman that our system and its expectations are a crushing let-down. But Friedman just quits his essay at that quote. Left at "imagination is more important than knowledge", you could as well be talking about why fundamentalism is granted equal intellectual respect in discourse on law and national educational policy. There is no war between imagination and knowledge folks and it is the ways we team the two that make progress in science.

Imagination, its just not that simple.

Science Fried days, hope and hype edition

One thing you learn from turning over all the rocks: the science and the reporting of science are two very different enterprises. I really wonder why one particular, and not terribly emphatic "result" was lifted from the obscure ACS Journal on Toxicology to the attention of the Washed-up Times readers.

The Washington Times is NOT where you go to read solid science reporting.
So here is a mystery: why do press releases or citations to Washed-up Times occupy the first page of Google hits when you search for the author of the paper mentioned in this story in ScienceDaily copied from UPI?
Neither ScienceDaily nor WT mention which science journal published the study. My first suspicion is that Pharma industry lobby who help fund work at the lab where Joshua Lambert works are not the best friends of the nutritional supplement industry, a less trusted, tested and financially intensive industry and are not above buying a little bad news for the herbal remedy salesmen. But this Rutgers lab looks like its on the up and up as far as its sponsor list is concerned. So I dug further to see if Lambert himself had done any other respected work. This publication for the nutrition supplement industry has its biases and found a rebutter for the results. But they do cite the actual article, which is in a perfectly respectable journal:

Chemical Research in Toxicology
2007, Volume 20, Pages 583-585
"Possible controversy over dietary polyphenols: Benefits vs risks"
Authors: J. Lambert, S. Sang and C.S. Yang

Articles generally favorable to use of compounds naturally occurring in fruits and vegetables are in that same journal issue, as well as the details of some dangerous and misused herbal supplements. When you read the article itself, its a review of previous studies of polyphenals and a report of investigations that hint at dose-dependent oxidative effects of certain polyphenals. The oxidative effects aren't necessarily bad since one of their results is killing cancer cells and, ironically, addition of the once-touted anti-oxidant superoxidedismutase [SOD] to the cultures inhibited this beneficial oxidation. This is hardly what one could call a clear picture though the tone of caution on using supplements is warranted. The results are heavily qualified and its conclusions a mild "further study is needed":

Herein, we will review the available data on the toxic potential of polyphenols as a prototypical class of dietary phytochemicals. As specific examples, we will discuss the prooxidative vs antioxidant potentials of tea catechins, the hepatic and intestinal toxicities of high doses of tea catechins, and the potential DNA damaging.... More in-depth studies on the potential adverse effects of dietary phytochemicals are required in order to assess the potential toxicities and to determine their potential usefulness as disease preventive and treatment agents.

What does Rev. Moon have against green tea anyway?

That is why I quit reading science news from anything but the original publications. You always have to be a little skeptical but when you go straight to the journals themselves, you get to be the first kid on the blog to see a really cool result like this detection of highly correlated genes involved in schizophrenia. These findings in the genes fit with tantalizing hints about connections to autoimmune diseases found by completely different methods of research into schizophrenia.

Fried Days News

I am still paying for this newspaper. The polling booths are closed but a blogger can always cast his vote for or against the news. My short takes on the Times:

• The race to find the money in Diabetes
• Get ready to protest the veto
• The Hitch Hiker's Guide to Brooklyn
• Cervical cancer is saved from vaccination in Texas
• Who has a better trend in infant mortality rate than the US?
• George Tenet, the head of the CYA, to hit the book signing circuit

If there is a race to find patentable diabetes cures, who is loosing?

Note and enjoy: lots of people in the streets is a very upsetting thing to the conservative mind. The rallying locations have been picked out already, and the call-trees parcelled out. When the call comes to go down to the streets to protest the PotUS's disdain for the will of the people whom he claims to serve, GO! MoveOn and many other activist organizations have done the planning and it will be up to you to make a show of support: it WILL make a difference.

Reading Douglas Adams' Hitch Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy should be mandatory for all residents of the five Burroughs:

“When I heard ‘don’t panic,’ I panicked,” said Ms. Sloley, who spent several hours on the sidewalk in a line of displaced residents.

Good ol' Texas: proving once again that it is never too late to do the wrong thing for women's health.

Afghanistan had nowhere to go but up Once the Murkin Talibangelists are sidelined, maybe the "richest nation on earth" can move out of its middle of the pack [twice as deadly a place to be born as, say, Hong Kong] ranking and join Afghanistan as one of the countries with an improving IMR.
[note: in checking the facts, every last document I found on these statistics is a damning comment on social inequalities in the US.]

If you watched Frontline, or read Richard Clarke, you would remember Tenet as an individual too conflicted to be in charge of what is one of the most sensitive and should be the most objective agency in the government. There are instances past counting to prove that one gets fired for telling the cheneypuppets to back off or even for just ignoring them and telling the truth. But that is the only moral course one could take. I would tell George "Its too late to grow a conscience. People have died. You are gonna make money on a CYA book about the CIA. Why don't you give the profits to build orphanages in Iraq or fix up long term care VA facilities?"

How to succeed in blogging without really caring

[This may be the only post I ever wrote with MBAs in mind]
Here, in only a vaguely sorted and orderly array are a set of things to think about if you plan to be the next Atrios or start the next Pandagon.

You Don't need the Venture Capital Arianna Huffington has at her disposal to pull this off but you need something even harder to come by this late in the land rush: a new angle and a demographic that has not yet found its own voice. The formulaic way to do this is to identify a group that is self selected by their feeling of anger toward group P or issue Q. Perceived powerlessness is a sure fire fountain of angers. It helps insure heightened interest if you choose your P's and Q's from the set of matters that do not have simple, politely definitive and universal consensus positions. Sex, religion and politics were the P's and Q's our parents used to advise us to avoid. But in the era of Rhetoric 2.0 and anonymous communication and confrontation by proxy, the hotter the better. DO consider what use your demographic makes of the web. For instance, while centenarians are a new and rapidly growing demo, few of them are on the web.

It will be hard to single handedly write half a dozen good posts per day...sharing the revenue is a zero sum process but enraged/engaged readers will visit several times a day if the content is ever fresh. That is not linear. Hosting costs are the most predictable if you pay nothing [blogspot.com] or $5/month [typepad.com e.g.] and least predictable if you roll your own [backups and service contracts and the fading neutrality of the net are NOT your friends]. The equation to solve, from a financial perspective, includes the empirically obtained H=Hits-Per-Day-Per-Post and a conservative productivity estimation of A=Average-Posts-Per-Day-Per-Blog-Author. Due to the bandwidth of the consumer there is an upper bound or a point of diminishing returns for adding yet more authors: just ask the big print media houses if you don't think that is so. If you are only in it for the money, consider working at a carwash. Part time. Buy the right domain even if you use Blogger or other free tool/host arrangements. Open source tools like Drupal can cut your entry costs down to the price of two server-grade PCs and a contract for a business Internet connection if Blogger is not customizable enough for your tastes. Spend a week with a book on CSS and HTML and you can probably knock together a free blog that has a signature logo and color scheme. When you have taken off into the 10000 hits per day stratosphere where it is hard to get hosted for zero bucks, you can pay a web designer to apply your signature features to your new home with your old domain if you don't have the chops or think Flash would make your pages .ORGasmic. If you know what the hooks are for your demographic, use them in a few one-week or one-month spots on the highest traffic sites that you can afford and that overlap in readership with the group whose interest and loyalty you hope to attract.

Choose your blog authors carefully and set up the teaming arrangements clearly: there must be a clear decision process, be it one honcho or something more collaborative, for deciding what is and what is not consistent with the issues list, the voice and the attitude of the blog: you have to have some consistency or you have no clear product and consequently very little audience retention. You are, in effect, making a brand name for a certain timbre of outrage on a certain selection of issues that you think will appeal to some under served demographic. Your writers must be expressive, concise, very good in an argument and truly "get it" about their issues...that means get it on both an intuitive level and the more academic way of knowing well the current literature, the important players and the back stories on their topics...its a lot like being a good reporter combined with being a sharp but not abusive editorial columnist. No accident that journalism majors and English majors have a leg up when they start and are well represented in the ranks of bloggers. Most likely there will be some big egos. The candidates with the most relevant experience and visibility may bring readers from their personal blogging or a previous stint. When they have the goods you want, they will have baggage too. Don't just survey the posts of a prospective blog mate, dig up their comments: do they tend to lose their cool? Unless parody or humor is their only shtick and the reason to take them on, are they basically self confident and intellectually honest? Deficiencies in these areas will be pounced upon by readers because the readers are also writers if your blog is succeeding.

There is a critical mass or "the rich get richer" sort of phenomenon that is hard to break through. It may be so psychically taxing on a good writer with a good idea making little headway in the race for readers that it is their strongest reason to write as a contributor on some other blog that has gotten onto this high ground. Readers sometimes RTFP clear through but often, especially for a familiar news item and a familiar writer, they skim and then look for a chance to one-up the last commenter or polish some point they think relevant. And sometimes they just want to say "me too!" All of that is entirely normal and what tends to make a loosely bonded community out of an audience. But the one thing you can count on them reading is anything they themselves wrote or which anyone else wrote in response. The end result of all this is reading frenzies in the comment section of some posts: people want to go where the action is and trade words with the smart people about the important causes. A frenzy in one place leaves a silence somewhere else. That differential in traffic is a herd phenomenon and not always proportional to the difference in quality or relevance in the writing. I know of no sure fire cure for that problem. But you can always make it worse by ignoring the commenters you do get.

Each writer will have their own "process" but for the blog to have some kind of stylistic cohesion that promotes reader recognition of a "product-like" consistency, some guidelines may need to be set. For instance, there may be a daily quota on "oddball human interest" posts. Scouring the entire web, tedious and not entirely automatable, is one of the best foundations of a writer's process: the more common sources of interesting news are already under your reader's bookmarks. The touch that the most popular writers appear to have is an ability to capture, harness and project anger without too much damage to logical thinking. It is a sign of some success if the members of the offensive group P stray onto a blogger's turf and think they are "hated". Mistaking anger for hate is the mark of one who does not "get it" and the fans pile on. Its not a pretty pattern but it generates clicks quite reliably. The process that is easy to do badly and a hackneyed yet successful formula is to be the first blogger of the day to come across some fresh outrage from a big mouthed member of group P or an insider report of the government's latest mendacious butchering of issue Q and write a few tart witness-leading sentences or turn the matter in an unusual light for a few paragraphs and let the fans tear into it for the rest of the day. Once posted, comments can be steered back onto topic and party lines on the issues can be illuminated by remarks from the author or others. Anger sells. It sells better to the right wing if fully formed in the mouth of the author. On the left just give'em the ball, they know how to kick. But it sells well on just about any turf.