This week's hero is John McCain (I almost can't believe I'm saying that) for trying to nip character-attack campaigning in the bud in North Carolina:

In an NBC interview aired on Friday, the Arizona senator said he has done all he can to persuade the state party to cancel the television ad that criticizes Obama as "too extreme" because of controversial remarks made by his former pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"They're not listening to me because they're out of touch with reality and the Republican Party. We are the party of Abraham Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan and this kind of campaigning is unacceptable," McCain told NBC's "Today" Show.

It's obvious that Republicans want to run against Hillary, but why waste money getting involved in the Democratic primary? Save that money for some Congressional or local candidate!

My hack this week is Al Gore, who is ducking in the wake of the bio-fueled instigated food crisis:

With prices for rice, wheat, and corn soaring, food-related unrest has broken out in places such as Haiti, Indonesia, and Afghanistan. Several countries have blocked the export of grain. There is even talk that governments could fall if they cannot bring food costs down.

One factor being blamed for the price hikes is the use of government subsidies to promote the use of corn for ethanol production. An estimated 30% of America’s corn crop now goes to fuel, not food.

“I don’t think anybody knows precisely how much ethanol contributes to the run-up in food prices, but the contribution is clearly substantial,” a professor of applied economics and law at the University of Minnesota, C. Ford Runge, said. A study by a Washington think tank, the International Food Policy Research Institute, indicated that between a quarter and a third of the recent hike in commodities prices is attributable to biofuels.

Last year, Mr. Runge and a colleague, Benjamin Senauer, wrote an article in Foreign Affairs, “How Biofuels Could Starve the Poor.”

“We were criticized for being alarmist at the time,” Mr. Runge said. “I think our views, looking back a year, were probably too conservative.”

We have to make sure our environmental policies aren't hurting people instead of the environment.

Labels: Economics, Energy, Enviroment, Hero/Hack, McCain

Posted by Ryan S. at 11:31 AM | Permalink | |

Thank you, Indiana:

Up until two years ago, only 15 of Indiana's 92 counties set their clocks an hour ahead in the spring and an hour back in the fall. The rest stayed on standard time all year, in part because farmers resisted the prospect of having to work an extra hour in the morning dark. But many residents came to hate falling in and out of sync with businesses and residents in neighboring states and prevailed upon the Indiana Legislature to put the entire state on daylight-saving time beginning in the spring of 2006.

CLOCK WATCHING

Research on the impact of extending daylight-saving time across Indiana found:

• Residential electricity usage increased between 1% and 4%, amounting to $8.6 million a year.

• Social costs from increased emissions were estimated at between $1.6 million and $5.3 million per year.

• Possible social benefits -- enhanced public health and safety and economic growth -- were not studied.

Indiana's change of heart gave University of California-Santa Barbara economics professor Matthew Kotchen and Ph.D. student Laura Grant a unique way to see how the time shift affects energy use. Using more than seven million monthly meter readings from Duke Energy Corp., covering nearly all the households in southern Indiana for three years, they were able to compare energy consumption before and after counties began observing daylight-saving time. Readings from counties that had already adopted daylight-saving time provided a control group that helped them to adjust for changes in weather from one year to the next.

Their finding: Having the entire state switch to daylight-saving time each year, rather than stay on standard time, costs Indiana households an additional $8.6 million in electricity bills. They conclude that the reduced cost of lighting in afternoons during daylight-saving time is more than offset by the higher air-conditioning costs on hot afternoons and increased heating costs on cool mornings.

This is now a national security issue. End DST!

Labels: Economics, Energy, Oil

Posted by Ryan S. at 7:57 PM | Permalink | |

What guides our energy policy is not a drive to save the environment or even security (either of those, or preferably both, would be a welcome change). Rather, it is the same thing that drives most other policies: "Special Interests" and lobbying.

One such example is ethanol. Ethanol is at best a temporary stop-gap in changing our energy supply. Nothing more (like hybrid cars).

Rolling Stone magazine has an excellent article on ethanol in its current issue.
An excerpt:

Ethanol, of course, is nothing new. American refiners will produce nearly 6 billion gallons of corn ethanol this year, mostly for use as a gasoline additive to make engines burn cleaner. But in June, the Senate all but announced that America's future is going to be powered by biofuels, mandating the production of 36 billion gallons of ethanol by 2022. According to ethanol boosters, this is the beginning of a much larger revolution that could entirely replace our 21-million-barrel-a-day oil addiction. Midwest farmers will get rich, the air will be cleaner, the planet will be cooler, and, best of all, we can tell those greedy sheiks to fuck off. As the king of ethanol hype, Sen. Chuck Grassley of Iowa, put it recently, "Everything about ethanol is good, good, good."

This is not just hype -- it's dangerous, delusional bullshit. Ethanol doesn't burn cleaner than gasoline, nor is it cheaper. Our current ethanol production represents only 3.5 percent of our gasoline consumption -- yet it consumes twenty percent of the entire U.S. corn crop, causing the price of corn to double in the last two years and raising the threat of hunger in the Third World. And the increasing acreage devoted to corn for ethanol means less land for other staple crops, giving farmers in South America an incentive to carve fields out of tropical forests that help to cool the planet and stave off global warming.

So why bother? Because the whole point of corn ethanol is not to solve America's energy crisis, but to generate one of the great political boondoggles of our time. Corn is already the most subsidized crop in America, raking in a total of $51 billion in federal handouts between 1995 and 2005 -- twice as much as wheat subsidies and four times as much as soybeans. Ethanol itself is propped up by hefty subsidies, including a fifty-one-cent-per-gallon tax allowance for refiners. And a study by the International Institute for Sustainable Development found that ethanol subsidies amount to as much as $1.38 per gallon -- about half of ethanol's wholesale market price.

Read the whole thing.

Related: High Fructose Corn Syrup is evil

Labels: Energy

Posted by Ryan S. at 2:00 PM | Permalink | |

I think High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS) is pretty much evil. The rise in use (see graph to the left) of HFCS rises eerily parallel rise in obesity in this country. Now scientists haven't proven anything yet, but loads of studies are being done (that's fine, it;s how science is supposed to work).

I happen to be of the school of thought that anything "natural," i.e. found in nature, or in use for a really long time. This makes cane sugar a much more attractive product to me than HFCS (crystalized sugar was around in India 2500 years ago).

Now I could assume that most people share my feelings at least insofar as they prefer to eat things they can pronounce or that don't have a need for acronyms. Why the switch then? HFCS is easier to mix, being a syrup, and it has a longer shelf life than cane sugar. But there is a third reason: The Government.

Wikipedia (with citations):

Because of a system of price supports and sugar quotas imposed since May 1982, importing sugar into the United States is prohibitively expensive. High fructose corn syrup, derived from corn, is more economical since the American price of sugar is artificially far higher than the global price of sugar^[8] and the price of #2 corn is artificially low due to both government subsidies and dumping on the market as farmers produce more corn annually.^[9][10]

In fact, the agribusiness lobby has spent a lot of money keeping the price of sugar high (near to totally impossible to grow in the US) and the price of corn low. Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) is one such agribusiness. According to CATO:

ADM has cost the American economy billions of dollars since 1980 and has indirectly cost Americans tens of billions of dollars in higher prices and higher taxes over that same period. At least 43 percent of ADM's annual profits are from products heavily subsidized or protected by the American government. Moreover, every $1 of profits earned by ADM's corn sweetener operation costs consumers $10, and every $1 of profits earned by its ethanol operation costs taxpayers $30.

Firms like ADM not only cost taxpayers money, but they also keep trade more restricted. Sugar was one of the major products specifically exempted in NAFTA and CAFTA. For example, one of the major provisions of CAFTA is "duty-free import and elimination of subsidies on agricultural products (not including sugar). [Emphasis mine]"

So there you have it. The government helping Americans fatten themselves and big business.

Another side issue is that agreements like NAFTA and CAFTA hurt the cause of real free trade by masquerading as free trade while still being government-controlled trade operations. This allows them to pass with enough restrictions and loopholes to essentially establish corporate welfare. And this hurts American consumers and international business owners/farmers.

Labels: Economics, Energy

Posted by Ryan S. at 8:30 AM | Permalink | |

As my regular readers are probably aware, I am a global warming skeptic (I know, crazy, right?). However, this does not mean I am dispassionate about environmental issues. I care a lot about the environment, and I think I do my part.

I don’t drive (a combination on not being able to afford a car and a lack of need), I turn off lights compulsively, and I shop at Trader Joe’s with my reusable shopping bag. My parents’ house is now at or near 100% fluorescent light bulbs.

Now, I don’t mention that because I want you all to congratulate me. I do it because I think it is the right thing to do, not because I want praise or the chance to win a $20 gift certificate every week at Trader Joe’s for using my bag (though if I win one, that would be awesome). My point here is that being green is a good thing. Absolutely, no question in my mind, a good thing.

Why do I think that but don’t think that humans are going to make the Statue of Liberty need a swimsuit in the next century? Simple, we only get one Earth, and we are obviously doing some not-so-nice things to it. The extent of the effects of those bad things is certainly disputable, but we should clean up our act. Human beings need to act as stewards for the environment, taking care of Creation.

We have to clean up our act in the right way. Preaching the Gospel of Carbon Offsets while flying around the world in a private jet doesn’t cut it. I have yet to hear anyone explain carbon offsets in a way that sounds neither like a pyramid scheme or latter day indulgences. It would be great for everyone to try to live a little greener and get smart about our energy consumption. But how to accomplish these goals?

The answer is to campaign hard to convince people to live greener. Simple as that. Changing public opinion with the right message (not contradictory ones that allow the rich to harm the environment while remaining pious or ocean-swallowing scare tactics) is the key to this movement. Getting the government to force people into being greener will not work. First, since when did the government become good at doing anything? Second, any legislation or program would probably fail anyway because it would have too many loopholes for lobbyist-happy corporations and a good chunk of the population is fine with cheating the government by cutting corners provided there isn’t an obvious human cost.

Conservatives need to become more environmentally aware and active, because this isn’t just an issue for the left, it’s for everybody. And smart environmental policies will only come about if both sides are talking.

Labels: Climate Change, Conservaism, Energy

Posted by Ryan S. at 8:30 AM | Permalink | |

I've been following the offshore wind farm story for a while now, and wanted to make sure I had enough information, but I'm in full support of the wind farm. Now coal isn't as bad as most of the enviros say it is, but I still think wind wins out.

I also fail to see why global warming is a "factor" in this decision. Can't we just do things good for the environment without the threat of destruction looming over us like Al Gore over a hamburger?

WaPo picked up the story today:

The plan, which could create the first wind "farm" in waters along the East Coast, envisions a thicket of turbines offshore of either Rehoboth Beach or Bethany Beach, Del. As the blades are spun by ocean winds, designers say, the wind farm could provide enough power every year for 130,000 homes.

Wind farms generate electricity by using the wind to turn giant blades that rotate turbines to make power. Though wind farms produce electricity while protecting the environment, not everyone is welcoming their arrival.

The wind farm is one competitor in an unusual kind of power-plant bake-off: Delaware officials are also considering plants that would burn coal or natural gas as they seek ways to generate more electricity. A preliminary decision could be made tomorrow.

Advocates of the other two plans cite that wind isn't constant, even over the ocean. I'm not sure how accurate of a concern that is, but if it poses a serious obstacle, then maybe a combination of wind and coal with scrubbers is the way to go.

Labels: Energy

Posted by Ryan S. at 9:52 AM | Permalink | |