Rise of the environment-killing pedestrian zombies

Why are most of my blog posts just repostings of letters I wrote to the forums at Salon.com? Maybe because I expect that someone will actually read. Or maybe it's because I need a fire lit under my butt before I produce anything I consider worth reading.

Today's kindling is brought to you by "leading environmentalist" Chris Goodall, author of How to Live a Low-Carbon Life and foremost proponent of the new and evil "driving is more eco-friendly than walking" meme. I attached this lengthy letter to Andrew Leonard's skeptical analysis of the claim.

Goodall's basic claim is that, if you have to choose between walking to a grocery store 1.5 miles away and driving the same distance, the food needed to replenish the burned calories has a bigger greenhouse gas impact than the gasoline burned.

There are obvious problems with this research (beyond the fact that his book's website breathlessly announces this conclusion as "new research", without mentioning that the research is entirely his own). First, and most suspicious, he assumes that all the calories come from factory-farmed beef, which has enormous environmental impact when compared to eating lower off the food chain. The other factor which severely undermines his conclusions is this: once a person decides on a car trip, it becomes very easy to travel further. Rather than the three miles in Goodall's calculations, they might go ten miles to take advantage of the two for one sale at a competing grocer, or a few more miles to go to multiple grocers, or another dozen miles to Costco to stock up on soy milk (guilty as charged).

There are other, less pressing inaccuracies, some of which actually help his case. He forgets that starting up a cold engine for a short trip uses more gas than a car's MPG rating would indicate. He also ignores cycling as an option (cycling burns about half as many calories per mile as walking). He forgets that you would burn more calories walking back, because you're carrying a lot of groceries. He seems to have made a mistake converting from miles to kilometers. A three mile walk should burn 300 calories, not 180. 180 is more likely from a three kilometer walk.

This crappy, back-of-the-napkin calculation doesn't warrant near the publicity it's receiving; it certainly shouldn't drive anyone's lifestyle changes. When I first heard of this, I (like Andrew Leonard) assumed that the calculation was just hyperbole designed to show how woefully inefficient our industrialized food production is. But reading Goodall's own "research", he mentions replacing walking with driving as the environmentally friendly option, not replacing that slab of factory-farmed steak with some peaches from the local farmer's market[1]. Sure, towards the end he makes a wistful comment about "reduc[ing] the greenhouse gas intensity of our foodstuffs." But it is supremely irresponsible for anyone who touts himself as a "carbon-reduction guru" to make "walk less, drive more" his only concrete suggestion.

Elsewhere, he has compared carbon credits to medieval indulgences[2], and has been commissioned by the Times of London to do a "carbon audit" of Prince Charles (a celebrity climate change crusader, somewhat akin to Al Gore on this side of the pond). Such behavior makes me suspect that the damage Gooding is doing to environmentalism is due to malice, not incompetence.

Update:

After a timely e-mailed response from Mr. Goodall, and a deeper perusal of lowcarbonlife.net, the author strikes me as sincerely committed to helping people reduce their environmental impact. I still worry that, on this particular issue, he's framing the story in a disastrous way, and a lot of people are going to take the message the wrong way. But I think his book has a lot of timely information, and it will be good for everybody if it sells well.


Notes:

[1] In several places in Gooding's report, he goes to great lengths to equate factory-farmed meat to all foodstuffs. Elsewhere, he calls ruminant-based food production "particularly damaging".

[2] I don't trust carbon credits yet, but I do believe that with better science, more auditing, and international agreements to give them more standing, they're going to become a key part of the fight.

From Salon: We're all going to die!

Malthus fascinates me. When someone mentions him, I have to chime in. Reposted from here for anyone who doesn't want to click on the link:

I'm in the "Malthus was right" camp. To me, the lack of a population crash thus far isn't evidence against his theory. Let me explain.

Malthus was certainly right in the trivial sense: exponential population growth cannot continue forever. But was he wrong for failing to predict the rise of the industrial agriculture and chemical fertilizers that have managed to feed our exponential growth? No. These developments didn't negate Malthus' theories. In fact, these discoveries may have worsened their eventual consequences.

Humans didn't find a brand new way to permanently increase our food supply. Instead, we started a straightforward oil for food program, where we pumped oil and natural gas from the ground, changed it into fertilizer and pesticide, and sprayed it all over the planet to increase our harvests. It's akin to the difference between getting a better job and finding a pile of money under a rock.

As a non-renewable resource, oil is a terrible basis for population growth. Once it runs out, the population supported by oil will need to either change their food source or shrink until it comes back in line with what the Earth can sustainably produce. If the supply of oil drops too suddenly, you end up with six or seven billion people living on a planet that can only really support a billion, all looking for their next meal.

Having that temporary infusion of resources has allowed humanity to far exceed the numbers that the planet can legitimately support. Malthus predicted that as we reached the limits of growth, there would be increasing downward pressure on the population, to the point that we could never overshoot carrying capacity by much. What he didn't foresee was a situation where the population didn't just reach the limits of subsistence, but rocketed past them, making the consequences of the eventual crash far more calamitous.

That's why I was a bit rankled by this post. Malthus' "limits of subsistence" are defined by the amounts that humans need in order to survive. It seems possible to reduce population growth by allowing each individual to consume far, far more resources than survival dictates. But whether the increased demands on resources come from our increasing numbers or our increasing consumption per capita, we're still putting ever greater stress on the planet's ability to sustain us.

Solving the population problem by bringing everyone up to a First World standard of living is a non-starter. The planet cannot keep up with the demands for resources humanity currently places on it. We need to scale back resource usage by either cutting back on people or resources used per capita.

Ah, for the good old days of government waste and mismanagement.

Conservatives, in the belief that government does things inefficiently, have outsourced waste and mismanagement to private contractors. Sure enough, they're far more efficient at wasting and mismanaging that money than the public sector ever was.

http://www.savannahnow.com/node/317101
http://www.supplymanagement.co.uk/EDIT/Top_stories_item.asp?id=16448
http://www.ciobinternational.org/en/news/1155

From the government report:

"The value of Federal contracts awarded without full and open competition has more than tripled since 2000. For the first time on record, last year more than half of Federal procurement spending was awarded through no-bid and limited competition contracts."

Not surprising that this trend has seen so much of an upswing since Bush took office. His tendency has always been towards greater privatization and less oversight.

Democrats are promising to look into this waste and abuse. Indeed, this report is a good start. I'm cynical enough to believe that this is intentional on the part of the Bush administration. No-bid contracts funnel taxpayer money into the pockets of shareholders, while bankrupting the government so as to make it incapable of providing for its citizens (as Grover Norquist put it, this helps make the government "small enough to drown in a bathtub"). Also, because we're getting so little bang for the buck, it makes the government look like a terrible mechanism for solving societal problems, which is how Bush-style conservatism wants us to view our government.

We need to demand oversight and accountability on every cent that the government spends, whether directly or through private contractors.

The Internet thinks I'm Gandhi.

The results of my latest Political Compass test puts me ideologically close to Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and The Dalai Lama. I'll take that as a compliment.

Take your own Political Compass test.

I was surprised that I was categorized into the strongly libertarian camp, since I've gleefully criticized libertarians as self-aggrandizing morons. My impression is that most of them want the world should be one giant dog-eat-dog brawl where that they can better indulge the fantasy that they are the biggest, scariest dogs out there.

I distrust government power somewhat, but I distrust corporate power far, far more. The former needs to be powerful to act as a check on the latter. But government power also needs to be both highly responsive to the will of the people and highly respectful of personal individual rights. I respect the idea of voluntary, regional collectivism, but I don't see how it can answer the problems of global problems like global warming.

"Forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked"

I finished reading Hardcore Zen yesterday, then tried meditating for the first time in a couple of years. When I opened my eyes again, the world looked strangely blue-filtered, and it seemed to me that I had some interesting ideas rolling through my head.

My brief foray into zen mastery accomplished little, but it made a certain blogosphere mini-controversy particularly relevant to me. Yesterday, the proceedings of the U.S. Senate were opened for the first time by a prayer from a Hindu cleric. As he tried to begin, the prayer was disrupted by angry shouting from three protesters.

Talking Points Memo has the YouTube video and commentary. The TPM story says that the anti-abortion group "Operation Rescue/Operation Save America" claimed responsibility for the protest, but I don't see an indication of that in the press release they sent out. All I see is unwavering support for their actions, and a chilling manifestation of a Talibanesque mentality right here in the U.S. As published on christiannewswire.com:

Theology has moved from the church house onto the floor of the United States Senate, and has been arrested.

Contact: Dr. Pat McEwen, Operation Save America, 321-431- 3962

WASHINGTON, July 12 /Christian Newswire/ -- Ante Pavkovic, Kathy Pavkovic, and Kristen Sugar were all arrested in the chambers of the United States Senate as that chamber was violated by a false Hindu god. The Senate was opened with a Hindu prayer placing the false god of Hinduism on a level playing field with the One True God, Jesus Christ. This would never have been allowed by our Founding Fathers.

"Not one Senator had the backbone to stand as our Founding Fathers stood. They stood on the Gospel of Jesus Christ! There were three in the audience with the courage to stand and proclaim, 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me.' They were immediately removed from the chambers, arrested, and are in jail now. God bless those who stand for Jesus as we know that He stands for them." Rev. Flip Benham, Director, Operation Save America/Operation Rescue

To Schedule Interviews with Rev. Benham:

Contact Pat McEwen: 321 431 3962

In the defense of the evil, backsliding, cowardly senators, all reports indicate that the Senate chambers were mostly empty. That's hardly unexpected, since half our senators are busy running for president. Anyhow, our senators are only paid the paltry sum of $141,000 a year. When you're paying such paltry wages, you have to expect a bit of sloth and indifference from your employees.

Cynical tangent aside, the press release sends a clear message. This government is the sole and exclusive property of our God, and any recognition of religious plurality defiles the original intent of our Founding Fathers.

I don't buy the whole "our Founding Fathers established a Christian nation" argument. First, whatever their personal beliefs about religion and spirituality, their intentions for the country can best be derived from the Constitution itself. The Constitution says surprisingly little about religion, except that religious tests are forbidden, and Church and State should keep their grubby paws off each other. If the Founders really believed as the righteous rednecks claim, they had ample opportunity to fill our nation's supreme document with all manner of pro-Christian items. They could have easily formalized the Constitution Party's belief that only believing Christians should be allowed to hold office. They could have easily forbid the government from passing laws contrary to the Bible. They could have required that all proceedings begin with a prayer by a Christian minister, to keep "a prayer of the wicked" from ever being uttered in the hallowed chambers of the Senate.

They didn't. Hell, when they were drafting the Constitution, they didn't even start their own proceedings with a prayer^[1]. If their goal was to create a nation founded on Christian principles, it seems like that would be the first order of business.

They didn't found a "Christian nation," because they knew that political power corrupts religion, turning it from a source of solace and inspiration into a tool for oppression. To imagine the country the Founding Fathers were striving mightily to avoid, just put yourself in the head of a protester who would shout "Lord Jesus, forgive us father for allowing a prayer of the wicked, which is an abomination in your sight," and imagine what sort of country he would found if given the chance.

Notes:

[1] Yes, we're all aware of Benjamin Franklin's famous plea that they do so. When I was a teenager, I was taught on numerous occasions (Church, Boy Scouts (basically the same thing)) that this speech marked a turning point in the Constitutional Convention. According to the legend, after he gave that speech, the logjam was broken and compromise became easier, all because God was now present at the proceedings. Perhaps his eloquent words did make people more generally inclined to compromise. But the hagiographical version of this story never fails to eave out one critical fact: Franklin's proposal was never voted on, and according to his own recollections, "except for three or four persons, [the attendees] thought prayers unnecessary." [source]

Of course, it's more complex than I'm letting on. It always is.


[Note: Blogger has Ctrl-P mapped to "Publish", when my EMACS-trained fingers think it merely means "move cursor to previous line". So when you see a half-written post, you now know precisely how I screwed up.]

[Frak! I did it again!]

Ask your doctor if incarcerex is right for you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TRPxN7DGy5c

Anonymous cowards

Andrew Leonard's How The World Works is my favorite globalization blog. His most recent entry on the housing bubble notes this bit of weirdness from the New York Times.

“We don’t really know the ripple effects,” said one industry official who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity and gravity of the situation. “It is causing a revaluation of the securities, some of which may lead to additional liquidations. That’s possible, but it’s not set in stone.”

Now, I realize that the financial gurus who invested heavily in sub-prime mortgages are feeling a little nervous right now, and there are a lot of people looking to find a lot of other people to blame. But unless the next sentence out of his mouth was, "Also, the upper management of Goldman-Sachs keep a gaming preserve where they shoot hobos for sport," this self-styled industry official is saying something pretty innocuous. He sort of reminds me of that friend everyone has; you know, the one that makes a big deal about some secret that he simply must not share. Then, when he reluctantly and ever-so-dramatically spills his guts, it's completely anticlimactic. It's something you already knew, or it's simply not the juicy gossip he thinks it is.

Anonymous sources played a key role in the run-up to the Iraqi occupation, especially in cases where the always chatty "Senior Administration Official"
pseudonymously towed the Administration party line. Since then, we've seen other mind-bending abuses of anonymous sourcing. The most hilarious example has to be when "Senior Administration Official" gave an interview in which he defended the honor of Sith Lord Dick Cheney. It was unmistakably clear from the quotes that "Senior Administration Official" sounded like a bit of a Dick himself.

SENIOR ADMINISTRATION OFFICIAL: Let me just make one editorial comment here. I've seen some press reporting says, "Cheney went in to beat up on them, threaten them." That's not the way I work. I don't know who writes that, or maybe somebody gets it from some source who doesn't know what I'm doing, or isn't involved in it. But the idea that I'd go in and threaten someone is an invalid misreading of the way I do business.

We don't expect much from the Vice President anymore (aside from the faint smell of burning sulfur when he enters the room), but can't we at least expect the competent handling of pronouns?

In my mind, anonymity should only be granted when a source faces potential retribution for revealing information, and there is nobody else willing to come forward with that information. In "Industry Official's" case, there have to be a number of people in the industry who would be willing to say what every last one of them must be thinking. In "Senior Administration Vice Pres-- er, Official's" case, there were clearly no grounds for granting anonymity. The protection of anonymous sources is for protecting the powerless from retribution by the powerful, not for protecting the powerful from accountability for their own words.

But it's not hard to understand why Cheney would want anonymity. Greenwald calls it an exercise in imperious power; he paints a picture of a veep so crazed with power that he demands no person be allowed to utter his name. I think there is a much simpler explanation: given Cheney's shaky credibility, everything sounds more believable when it doesn't sound like it's coming from him.

I'm going to start collecting these weird uses of anonymous sourcing, because the topic interests me, and because it's faster than composing an entire long-winded rant. Gotta keep the content comin'.

On a related note, I got my first anonymous troll. It's good to know that someone is reading.

Climate crusader ... Rupert Murdoch?

Rupert Murdoch is going carbon neutral, and wants to take all of News Corp. with him. It's like waking up one morning to the headline, "World's Bunnies Picketing Major Cities: Demanding 40-hour Work Week, Carrots." It's as though the West Antarctic Ice Shelf of my brain has detached from the firm ground of reality, and is sailing off into the ocean of hallucination, to melt and raise the oceans of insanity until they drown this whole crappy analogy.

What I'm saying is, it was unexpected. In retrospect, it shouldn't have been. Murdoch is a businessman, and environmentalists have long argued that heading off climate change makes good business sense. Yet I find myself surprised that anyone was listening, much less someone with such a reputation for no-holds-barred right-wingery.

He's also an Australian, and as he mentions in the interview, Australia is in the middle of its worst drought in 100 years. That must hit close to home. He was also greatly influenced by his son, who has been arguing the issue with him for a while now.

News Corp going carbon neutral is laudable. But I'm more excited -- and more concerned -- that Murdoch wants to use his media outlets to give global warming greater coverage. I'm not worried that Fox News will take this as a directive to give more camera time to uber-skeptics like Richard Lindzen. In fact, I'm sure that this time media consolidation -- and FOX News' unique brand of "fair and balanced" journalism -- will work in my favor this time around. But it's a tiny bright spot amidst an overwhelmingly negative trend.

I, for one, look forward to seeing Sean Hannity call someone Un-American for driving a Hummer. It'll warm my heart.

First it's men marryin' men, then it's men marryin' goats.

I tried to post a response to Dinesh D'Souza's strange piece that seems to claim that gay marriage makes polygamy unavoidable, and somehow Mitt Romney is responsible for it all. I had trouble getting the posting to work (further evidence of the vast, right-wing conspiracy to silence me), so I'm reposting here (somewhat modified):

I would agree that, once gay marriage is widely accepted -- something I very much hope will happen -- it's a pretty short logical and ethical jump to get to polygamy. But in your lazy analysis, you're glossing over several factors that make it unlikely that polygamy is inevitable or even likely:

1) Whereas gay marriage simply requires a few deletions of gender references (as there is very little legal distinction between the "husband" and "wife" roles), polygamous marriage requires that every piece of legal code factor in the possibility of a third interested party.

2) Very few of the people fighting for gay marriage are taking up arms in defense of polygamy as well. In fact, many advocates are downright hostile to polygamy.

3) In turn, many of the most strident practitioners of polygamy (those who practice it out of a sense of religious duty) are hostile towards gay marriage, or any combination that involves more than one man.

In short, once gay marriage becomes a mainstream legal entity, polygamy will not simply be an unintended consequence. Despite being the next logical step, it would still face huge legal hurdles. You could just as easily say that, because most arguments for banning marijuana are equally applicable to cigarettes, we're just a razor's edge from legalizing the former or banning the latter.

Another problem with your simplistic, slippery-slope thinking: any such argument requires that you demonstrate that the bottom of the slope is a terrible place to wind up. If two men and three women did decide to enter into a lifelong, committed relationship, why is that horrible? It doesn't affect your relationship with Mrs. D'Souza. I don't see any widespread social ills arising. Hell, you can't even say that The Lord Almighty finds the practice offensive; there are just too many biblical counterexamples.

It's pure sophistry to pretend that the various restrictions on the practice of marriage are equally subject to revision. You list four:

1) "It requires that only two people be involved"

2) "It requires that they be adults"

3) "and not closely related"

4) "and (except in Massachusetts) it insists that one of the parties be male and one female."

Why not add some more?

5) "Marriage must be between members of species homo sapiens."

6) "Marriage must be entered into by the consent of both parties."

If gay marriage passes, are those two restrictions in imminent danger as well? Surely not. Allowing gay marriage won't open the floodgates for plural marriage, brother-sister marriages, man-on-child marriages, forced marriages, or marriage between a man and a box of pencils. Each is a different situation with different social and ethical ramifications, different supporters and detractors, and each would require separate changes to the law to enact. To pretend otherwise is just crap punditry.

I bid you adieu, and wish you nothing but poor luck in your defense of the Inviolable and God-Ordained Sanctity of the subset of possible marriage customs that were openly practiced and socially accepted in the 1950's-era U.S.

Though I failed to add it, I thought it was odd that homophobic views would be found 'neath a banner that says, "News Bloggers: Hard News, Raw Opinions, Penetrating Perspectives." Somebody over at AOL must have had trouble keeping a straight face when they pitched that slogan. Also, pay particular attention to comment #4 beneath the story; it contains some of the most insightful commentary on the sex-crazed gay menace that you'll ever see.

Rumblings from the icy fields of Greenland

The debate thus far: In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore popularized the rather alarming vision of a twenty foot rise in sea level. That's how much rise we'd get if the water tied up in either the West Antarctic Ice Sheet or the Greenland ice went into the oceans (or half of each). It's not easy to forget that graphic showing the water moving inland into Florida, or the idea that millions of senior citizens might have to move back in with their kids.

That picture acted as a great big two-by-four to the skull of America's collective consciousness, summing up in a few seconds the many varied potential devastations our inaction might cause. It was too effective to go unanswered. In the journalistic travesty that was "Exposed: Climate of Fear," Glenn "Prove to us that you're not working with our enemies" Beck tried to stem the damage[1]:

BECK: Now, what about that really cool animation of Florida and Manhattan drowning? Huh, cool, huh? You`ve seen these horrific scenarios everywhere based purely on catastrophic hypotheticals that dramatically exaggerate even what the U.N. says. It`s Al Gore`s best supporting actor, the word "if."

GORE: If we have an increase of five degrees, if Greenland broke up and melted...

... if this were to go, sea level worldwide would go up 20 feet.

MARIO LEWIS, PHD, GOVERNMENT POLICY ANALYST: Where he`s misleading is that he gives the impression that this is something that is likely to happen. The likelihood of this is next to nil.

DAVID LEGATES, PHD, CLIMATOLOGIST, UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE: The IPCC report is that the upper limit of sea level rise by the year 2100 is going to be about 23 inches.

HORNER: That`s why Al Gore makes up 20 feet. The truth isn`t scary.

BECK: Just look at the difference between Greenland`s ice melt in Al Gore`s scenario when spread out over a century versus what the IPCC projects.

CHRISTY: To come up with 20 feet is really grasping at straws, I think, but it does make a dramatic image.

Indeed, the IPCC report does say that 23 inches of sea rise is the most we can expect, and 2100 seems awful far away. Time doesn't come to a stop at the end of this century, and sea rise would continue over several centuries, eventually leading to the rise that Gore reported in the movie. But twenty feet doesn't sound that dangerous, if we have a millennium to adapt or fix it.

But that's just the question: will it take millennia, or decades? We know that if present warming trends continue, we are eventually going to lose major portions of both ice shelves. The real controversy is exactly how long it will take and how much we will lose.

Enter the reassuring IPCC figures on global sea rise -- the only part of the IPCC report that climate skeptics seem to take seriously. Beck's posse wants us to believe that the twenty foot scenario is laughable to anyone who actually understands the issues. To do that, they fundamentally misrepresent the findings of the report.

RealClimate.org (as always) does a great job reporting on this issue. It's especially interesting to see which contributions to overall sea level rise are factored into the IPCC figures.

But let's just focus on the critical weasel words:

Dynamical processes related to ice flow not included in current models but suggested by recent observations could increase the vulnerability of the ice sheets to warming, increasing future sea level rise. Understanding of these processes is limited and there is no consensus on their magnitude. -- IPCC Report (Summary for Policy Makers)

In other words, the IPCC is being very conservative in their sea level estimations. In these words, we see that the IPCC recognizes that the ice shelves are not well understood, and may slide into the ocean far faster than their projections would indicate.

What the global warming deniers are contractually obligated never to acknowledge[2] is that these IPCC reports are very conservative documents. They do not go beyond the evidence available in the published literature, and in fact they have to set a date after which they don't accept new research (to avoid having to rewrite the report). New evidence -- which didn't make it into the report -- suggests that the Greenland shelf is becoming highly unstable.

Recently, geologists discovered an unusual class of earthquake, associated with the movements of ice sheets. In Greenland, they're highly seasonal (occuring mostly in the summer months), and -- more worryingly -- the number of incidents has more than doubled in the last few years.

More information can be found here. It's too soon to say whether the ice will melt gradually or crash into the ocean in a few sudden rushes. The science isn't in yet.

While we're waiting to find out exactly how bad it's going to be, and how quickly we'll have to rush to build twenty foot high walls around our coastal cities, everyone get out there and start shopping. For Hummers. Because the most important thing we can do to prepare for the future is to grow the economy so big that we can pay for any problems that arise. And keep watching Glenn Beck to get "the other side of the story." That boy's a straight shooter.

Notes:

[1] Beck is far from a neutral source on the issue. Of the nineteen "experts" he's brought on his show to discuss global warming, only two of them supported the consensus position [source]. While he's hardly the first skeptic to take on the topic of sea levels, his approach is representative of the techniques used.

[2] Standard Noncorporeal Essence Transferrence of Ownership Contract, Article IV, subclause 3. Requests for sample copies of this contract can be made to the Legal Affairs Department of the Third Circle of Hell.