Ross Hunter's Public Library

I would also like to expand on the last paragraph of this post. The media has been downplaying most of the extreme weather events in recent years and any potential link to climate change. As a resident of middle Tennessee, the statewide flooding caused by our extreme deluge on May 1 and 2 was a wake-up call. It’s barely been six weeks since that catastrophic event, but during that relatively short time period, I’ve noticed several other significant weather events in the US, and globally.

Just two weeks after the Tennessee disaster massive flooding occurred in Poland. Parts of Texas were flooded when they received 11 inches of rain on June 9. At least 20 people were killed in Arkansas on June 11 when rivers rose at a rate of 8 ft per hour from torrential rain. On June 14, storms dropped about 10 inches of rain in Oklahoma, causing significant flooding in several counties. At least 11 people died in southern France on June 16 when heavy rains triggered flash floods. At least 35 people have died as result of flash flooding in China from torrential downpours, also On June 16. To my knowledge, none of this flooding was the result of rain storms associated with tropical storms.

During this same six week period, Colorado received a massive hailstorm on May 26 that delivered up to 12 inches of baseball sized hail in some places. Deadly tornadoes ravaged parts of the Midwest. There have also been tornado warnings in the Northeast on at least two different occasions (an area that almost never experiences this kind of severe weather), and we are experiencing a heat wave in parts of the Midsouth currently.

These are just the anomalies that I happened to notice. This spring/early summer seems to have an exceptionally high concentration of extreme weather events. It seems obvious for there to be a connection between all these weather extremities and the fact that this is one of the hottest springs on record. If 100 to 1000 year floods are happening daily, or weekly, citizens need to understand the likelihood of this continuing trend, and prepare for these kinds of events.

This is not just about energy policy and it’s link to climate change (which also must be addressed), it’s also about creating a greater awareness of the current weather trends, and helping to prepare our fellow citizens and infrastructure for this unsettling new reality.

Coming late to the discussion, but Joe that’s a nice piece of writing. I went over to Salon just to admire it. This thread turned to BP and the plug but your piece was originally about Obama and his realpolitik.

He IS a mystery though, don’t you think? I truly believe he’s the very, very best we could hope for in a man for these times. And I believe that, as with any presidency, eight years is the true time-scale to view him in.

But how to square his capabilities with the way he responds to all these hollywood-sized situations gripping enough for even the dimwit media to take an interest?

Is he the canary sent into the mine, the litmus paper that shows the temper of the times and the degree to which the fix is in? Why is it that he fails to act as boldly as his temperament and rhetoric indicate that he would, if he had a level, or at least supportive, field to play on?

I’m genuinely stumped, at this point, about our man. I should wait the eight years of course, but we live in impatient times. I’m glad you think about all this too. I hope you can supply the answers to the enigma.

yep. It’s funny. And worth reposting to facebook, which I just did.

There’s an old Chinese story about the man who walked past the guards and picked up some precious gold object on display and started to walk away with it. Arrested, he realized and explained that he hadn’t seen the guards, or thought about the ownership; all he could see was the gold. It’s very profound, and deals with attachment, which drives out wisdom, which is always present in every situation if WE are present in that situation. The story of the West could be the story of that thief.

Well biofuels, including algae:

Compete with food security, energy security, and water security; a World Bank 2008 report estimates that biofuels have increased food prices by 75%; increasing AGW-related temperatures expected to decrease crop yields (recent US national assessment) and increase irrigation requirements; algal biodiesel potential, but current small-scale production costs of $33/gal are too high and based on first principles of solar insolation falling on a square meter of land, the maximum algal biodiesel yield you could expect to get is around 1 gallon/square meter/yr with photobioreactors cost over $100/square meter; a recent Proceedings of NAS study reported that jatropha requires five times as much water per unit of energy as sugarcane and corn, and nearly ten times as much as sugar beet–the most water-efficient biofuel crop and jatropha requires an average of 20,000 liters of water for every liter of biodiesel with soybeans and rapeseed, the two other biodiesel crops considered in the study, being next highest, each requiring roughly 14,000 liters of water per liter of fuel

Even when our sleeves brush together, it is our karma.
--Japanese proverb

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    Ross Hunter

    ah, that's so true .. we believe in karma for the heavy lifting but we ignore the miniscule - yet this is exactly how fine it grinds. Karma is everything, everywhere, all the time.
    
    To be skillful is to train in the habits of beneficial acti...on, within the never-sleeping field of action, inside the cage of causes and conditions in which we are all caught...
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A bright green economy is not analogous to a dirty economy, just with the energy sources swapped: it can work differently, and, on balance, better: it can produce new innovations, better designs, more intelligently planned cities, stronger communities, healthier kids, long-lifespans, higher qualities of life. A bright green world isn't just less bad environmentally; it's better in nearly every way.

Perhaps, as I've been told, economists would have to break long-established traditions and count more externalities in order for their models to reflect that reality. Maybe it's time they got started.

In particular, there is no reason to assume that free markets will deliver an outcome that we consider fair or just. So the case for market efficiency says nothing about whether we should have, say, some form of guaranteed health insurance, aid to the poor and so forth. But the logic of basic economics says that we should try to achieve social goals through “aftermarket” interventions. That is, we should let markets do their job, making efficient use of the nation’s resources, then utilize taxes and transfers to help those whom the market passes by.

 But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for their actions — any presumption that the market economy, left to its own devices, will do the right thing goes out the window. So what should we do? Environmental economics is all about answering that question.

Now, efficiency isn’t everything. In particular, there is no reason to assume that free markets will deliver an outcome that we consider fair or just. So the case for market efficiency says nothing about whether we should have, say, some form of guaranteed health insurance, aid to the poor and so forth. But the logic of basic economics says that we should try to achieve social goals through “aftermarket” interventions. That is, we should let markets do their job, making efficient use of the nation’s resources, then utilize taxes and transfers to help those whom the market passes by.

 But what if a deal between consenting adults imposes costs on people who are not part of the exchange? What if you manufacture a widget and I buy it, to our mutual benefit, but the process of producing that widget involves dumping toxic sludge into other people’s drinking water? When there are “negative externalities” — costs that economic actors impose on others without paying a price for t

I think that there are two main points that Stiglitz makes. The first is that standard IMF policy has tended to approach countries in financial crises with the same rather crude economics as that used on Wall Street, which leads them to think like bank managers rather than economists. If you force a country with a fiscal deficit to reduce government spending, then this will reduce aggregate demand, which will reduce government income, and make the deficit worse, inflicting more pain on the population. The reason that the IMF does this, is that it is meant to restore confidence in the markets, but once a crisis starts, foreign investors tend to bail out anyway, so all it buys you is breathing space. You should accept that the foreign investors are gone, and focus on growth.

The other thing that I got from the book is the hypocrisy of the US administration, which forced policies on emerging markets, which it would not itself accept. In fact, the IMF more or less took instructions from the US Treasury during the 1990s, and certainly my sense at the time was that the actual IMF staffers were very frustrated at the policies that the US government forced them to follow. The point though, is that while the US government was battling the balanced budget amendment at home, on the reasonable grounds that it limited their freedom to manage demand, they were essentially forcing a balanced budget amendment on the emerging markets via IMF conditionalities. I remember attending a Paris Club meeting, where the Fund said that they were aware that budget deficits could be beneficial - this was never reflected in the lending policies that the Treasury forced on them. Other examples are forcing central banks to focus only on inflation, and forcing emerging markets to open their markets, while protecting US farmers from imports.

And for the sake of our health, please keep raising and selling your pastured beef.

The system of producing feedlot beef requires antibiotics to keep the cattle alive because the unnatural food they’re forced to eat makes them sick. Michael Pollan has illustrated this clearly.

So what you provide us is non-sick beef.

Looking across America we see an increasingly unwell population. And sick beef is cheap enough everyone can eat it all the time.

Poor, foolish, overweight, health-impaired America.

We are in a silent crisis in America because our food supply chain is being poisoned, and will ultimately be destroyed. What’s causing this is the action of corporate practices that exist only to strip every last dollar out of farming until the land is dead. Then the buyers of food will eat whatever they are fed to survive.

This crisis needs to become louder. It needs to turn into the scream it really is. We are being killed by bad food, and the answer for each one of us lies within a few miles of where we live.