"Clean coal is an impossibility"

Newsweek has an informative piece on the horrible ash spill in Tennessee.

It happened at a time when the world is increasingly worried about climate change for which, among others, burning coal is a big time contributor. China and India keep shoving coal into the burners to sustain their energy needs.
The coal lobby in the US keeps promoting "clean coal".

And then this Tennessee accident:

The largest industrial spill in U.S. history, it has created an environmental and engineering nightmare. The cleanup effort, which the Environmental Protection Agency is overseeing, could cost as much as $1 billion (though estimates continue to climb) and take years to complete. Meanwhile, the released ash—which is packed with toxins like arsenic, lead, and selenium—threatens to poison the air and water. Congressional committees are investigating the failure, some lawmakers are calling for greater regulation of utilities, and the EPA is probing about 400 other facilities across the country that store ash in similar ways. Yet the debacle has had another, potentially more far-reaching, impact: it has displayed in the most graphic manner imaginable just how dirty coal is. At a time when seemingly everyone from President Barack Obama on down is talking about "clean coal," the spill showed it's anything but. "Kingston opened people's eyes," says Lisa Evans of Earthjustice, a nonprofit environmental-law firm. "Clean coal is an impossibility."

If we have such problems with "benign" coal ash, then I shudder to think what a small mistake with nuclear waste might do. Calling Dr. Strangelove, Calling Dr. Strangelove!

Harry Potter and pals give up their wands

Obama invokes Jesus more than Bush

As president, Barack Obama has mentioned Jesus Christ in a number of high-profile public speeches — something his predecessor George W. Bush rarely did in such settings, even though Bush’s Christian faith was at the core of his political identity.

Obama’s invocation of the Christian Messiah is more overt than Americans heard in the public rhetoric of Bush in his time in the White House — even though Bush’s victories were powered in part by evangelical voters. ...

“I don’t recall a single example of Bush as president ever saying, ‘Jesus’ or ‘Christ,’” said Tony Perkins, president of the conservative Christian group Family Research Council. “This is different.”

To Perkins, Obama’s overtly Christian rhetoric is a welcome development from an administration that he largely disagrees with on the issues, though Perkins sees a political motive behind it, as well.

“I applaud that. It gives people a sense of comfort,” Perkins said. “But I think it’s a veneer, a facade that covers over a lot of policies that are anti-Christian.” That includes, in his view, Obama’s stance in favor of abortion rights.

The Rev. Barry Lynn, the executive director of the group Americans United for Separation of Church and State, doesn’t like the trend with Obama: “I don’t need to hear politicians tell me how religious they are,” Lynn said. “Obama in a very overt way does what Bush tended to do in a more covert way.”

I wonder how the secular and atheistic supporters of Obama will respond to this report from Politico .....

Great Rececssion, pregnancy, and recovery

Warren Buffett provides a fascinating analogy to explain that the recovery will take a while:
"You can't produce a baby in one month by getting nine women pregnant".

"Obama's war" and Pakistan's fate

I am not a big fan of Tariq Ali; but, hey, I have to give credit where it is due. Ali details the mess that Pakistan is in this essay in the London Review. He writes:

As far as the political temperature goes there is never a good month in Pakistan. This is a country whose fate is no longer in its own hands. I have never known things so bad. The chief problems are the United States and its requirements, the religious extremists, the military high command, and corruption, not just on the part of President Zardari and his main rivals, but spreading well beyond them.

This is now Obama’s war. He campaigned to send more troops into Afghanistan and to extend the war, if necessary, into Pakistan. These pledges are now being fulfilled. On the day he publicly expressed his sadness at the death of a young Iranian woman caught up in the repression in Tehran, US drones killed 60 people in Pakistan. The dead included women and children, whom even the BBC would find it difficult to describe as ‘militants’. Their names mean nothing to the world; their images will not be seen on TV networks.

And this is only the beginning of a very depressing essay. I cannot imagine how regular life goes on in Pakistan. I wonder if people just shut themselves off--a denial of sorts?

The cost of parking

Urban planners and economists keep harping on the notion that parking is severely under-priced, and the more a good is under-priced the more the incentive for consumers to over-consume. The result is that almost universally we complain about lack of parking spaces.

According to the Economist,

The cheapest parking in the survey is in India, where a spot in Chennai costs 96 cents a day.

Even in Indian prices, that is awfully cheap. It is amazing how expensive parking is in some of the European cities.

A trillion here, two trillions there. Trouble.

Contrasting news stories. First the news, and then my comments :-)

News 1 from CNN: Uncle Sam is one trillion dollars in the hole. For the first time ever.

By the end of fiscal 2009, the government expects to be in debt by $1.84 trillion. The Treasury said it expects that its expenditures to approach $4 trillion while its income will only be $2.16 trillion.

For fiscal 2010, Treasury said it expects to have a budget deficit of $1.26 trillion, with $3.59 trillion in expenses and a slightly more robust $2.33 trillion in receipts.

While we are trying to digest what a trillion-dollar deficit might mean, it is quite a contrast on the other side of the world, which is News 2 from Bloomberg: China's foreign-exchange reserves surge, exceeding two trillion:

China’s foreign-exchange reserves, the world’s biggest, topped $2 trillion for the first time as the nation’s economic recovery prompted overseas investors to pump money into stocks and property. ...
About 65 percent of China’s reserves are in dollar assets, with the rest mostly in euros, yen and sterling, estimates Wang Tao, an economist with UBS AG in Beijing. It is “difficult to stop buying U.S. Treasuries when markets for most other assets are too small and too illiquid,” she said in a report last month.

Analysis from the BBC: How long will China finance America?

A recent speech by Zhou Xiaochuan, the governor of the Chinese central bank, conceded - in a slightly elliptical way - that China would have to lend more to the US, to see it through the current economic and financial crisis.

He said: "in the short run, the US may need more capital inflows to deal with the financial crisis".

So China will continue to fund the growing gap between America's public expenditure and its tax revenues, by recycling to the US the cash of overseas investors who prefer to invest in China's real assets.

Mr Zhou is clear that allowing America to live beyond its means is profoundly unhealthy for the global economy in the long term.

As he said: "over the long run, large capital inflows are not in its best interest of making adjustments to its economic growth model".

Or to put it another way, the US public, private and financial sectors all have to reduce their indebtedness: Americans have to save more.

But there is huge self-interest on the part of the Chinese in not forcing America to go cold turkey - in breaking its borrowing addiction - too quickly. China's exporters, squeezed savagely over the past year by the global recession, would hardly relish another lurch downward in US demand for their stuff.

I agree with Jim Fallows' and Larry Summers' observation that the US-China are locked in a mutually assured economic destruction: China needs American consumption. America needs the Chinese to provide the cheap money to finance this consumption.

This, however, cannot prevail for long. Will be quite a world when this Gordian Knot is untangled. I just hope it does not happen similar to how Alexander got rid of that knot.

The Uighur-issue morphs into Chinese oil issue!!!

In an earlier post, I commented that China might be able to rid itself of Communist Party's choke-hold not via Tibet, or via some radical movements for democracy. Instead, I think it will be only through a successful Uighur revolution. Now, even if the Party does not get ousted, I certainly wish for an equal treatment of Uighurs--equal to how the Hans are treated.
In that post, I worried though that the Uighurs themselves will be shortchanged if al-Qaeda decides to make this a rallying cause. Well, al-Qaeda has fired that first shot:

China has warned its citizens in Algeria about possible attacks from al Qaeda in retribution for a Chinese government crackdown in the Muslim region of Xinjiang, and security has been tightened around Beijing's missions in the Philippines.

The Chinese embassy in Algeria on its web site urged all Chinese people and organisations to be more aware of safety precautions and to strengthen security measures "in consideration of the situation after the July 5 incident in Urumqi".

The warning came after London risk consultancy Stirling Assynt said in a report to clients that al Qaeda might target Chinese workers in northwest Africa, citing "chatter" after the July 5 ethnic riots in Urumqi, capital of Xinjiang.

"China has been reminding overseas Chinese to pay attention to their safety and enhance self protection ... China will take any necessary measure to protect the safety of Chinese organisations and citizens overseas," Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang told reporters on Tuesday when asked to comment on the report.

In the Philippines, which is battling a Muslim insurgency in its south, the government has ordered security to be tightened around the Chinese embassy and consulates, said Andres Caro, head of the national police directorate.

So, why does China have so much of an interest in North Africa for its citizens to be there you ask? Good question! What might Algeria, Sudan, and Libya have that China might need? The same thing that cynics contend drives American interest in the Middle East: OIL!!!

Let us then summarize the story thus far:
The Uighurs, who have a long history in Central Asia, and who are Muslims, have tried establishing their independence, but were absorbed into China, with an "autonomous" status--Xinjiang. And then in the name of promoting economic development, Beijing has been "Hannifying" Xinjiang so much so that the Han population is now about 45% in Xinjiang. There are extensive reports of how Uighurs are treated as second-class citizens in their own "autonomous" province. Every once in a while, as the Uighurs demand better treatment, China puts them down. And now, al-Qaeda is ready to target Han Chinese in North Africa, who are there primarily because of the Chinese economic demand for petroleum and natural gas.

So, is there anybody out there watching out for the Uighurs? US? UK? India? Russia? Oh yeah, the brave Turkey--yes, that same country which has a problem even talking about what happened to Armenians within their borders a hundred years ago.

What a crappy world this is, eh!

The unemployed, and the millionaires, in Oregon

Unemployment in Oregon is not showing signs of coming down, even though this is the peak of the tourist season that generates a lot of employment. According to Forbes:

Oregon's unemployment rate hovered at 12.2 percent in June - essentially unchanged from the previous month but still a modern high and more than double the rate a year ago.

The latest figure also was well above the U.S. rate of 9.5 percent as Oregon's recession-bound economy shed another 7,200 jobs last month.

Contrast that with the following news item:
The Portland Business Journal reports that we have fewer millionaires than a year ago:

Oregon boasts 61,621 households with a net worth of more than $1 million, the 25th-most in the country.

About 4.12 percent of the state’s 1.495 million households have net worths of $1 million or more, Phoenix Marketing International researchers found. The top five states are Hawaii, Maryland, New Jersey, Connecticut and Virginia.

In Oregon, as in the rest of the country, the number of millionaires is declining.

In 2007, 4.88 percent of state households reported net worths of $1 million or more. That dropped to 4.5 percent last year.

An irony that the two updates were on the same date, only hours apart!

We come in peace. Really!

In my intro classes, when I discuss demographic transition, I point out that as much as we like to think that humans are large-scale killers, well, the more time progresses, it seems like wars and the like kill fewer percentage of humans than in earlier centuries. Life is, by and large, quite peaceful for most humans on the planet.

Steve Pinker begins his essay on that very note. He writes:

Far from causing us to become more violent, something in modernity and its cultural institutions has made us nobler. In fact, our ancestors were far more violent than we are today. Indeed, violence has been in decline over long stretches of history, and today we are probably living in the most peaceful moment of our species' time on earth.

So, what is the reason for this decline in violence, while we walk around thinking that life is getting worse? Hmmm ..... can you do some work and read his essay? Pinker concludes:

We enjoy the peace we find today because people in past generations were appalled by the violence in their time and worked to end it, and so we should work to end the appalling violence in our time. Nor is it necessarily grounds for optimism about the immediate future, since the world has never before had national leaders who combine pre-modern sensibilities with modern weapons.

But the phenomenon does force us to rethink our understanding of violence. Man's inhumanity to man has long been a subject for moralization. With the knowledge that something has driven it dramatically down, we can also treat it as a matter of cause and effect. Instead of asking, "Why is there war?" we might ask, "Why is there peace?" If our behavior has improved so much since the days of the Bible, we must be doing something right. And it would be nice to know what, exactly, it is.

Thanks to A&L Daily for the link.

Bing. Chrome. OS. Who cares!

I used Google Chrome for a couple of months, until it crashed one day a few months ago and simply would not revive. Even re-installing a couple of times made no difference. There was no point using IE because of the time it took to even open the program. So, for now it is Firefox. I am so ready for a next generation of web browsers. I can't quite figure out what that might look like, but it cannot be minor variations of what we have.

After my experience with Chrome, I have pretty much given up on taking any Google product for a test drive--I use enough Google services already (blogger, YouTube, reader, groups.) I wasn't jumping up and down about Google's new operating system because none of these tinkerings excite me that much. But I just could not think about the common thread among all these to explain my ennui. Until I read Robert Cringely, who, with this op-ed, shows why he has a wonderful understanding of the big picture:

none of this is likely to make a real difference for either company or, indeed, for consumers. It’s just noise — a form of mutually assured destruction intended to keep each company in check.

Microsoft makes most of its money from two products, Microsoft Windows and Microsoft Office. Nearly everything else it makes loses money, sometimes deliberately. Google makes most of its money from selling Internet ads next to search results. Nearly everything else it does loses money, too.

Neither company really cares because both make so much from their core products that it simply doesn’t matter. But companies, like people, strive and dream and in this case both dream, at least sometimes, of destroying the other. Only they can’t — or won’t — do it in the end, because it is against the interests of either company to do so.

The vast majority of Google searches are, of course, done on PCs running Microsoft Windows and Internet Explorer. It is not in Google’s real interest to displace these products, which have facilitated so much of its success. Chrome products are given away, so they bring in no revenue for Google, and they don’t even provide a better search or advertising experience for their users, the company admits. So why does Google even bother?

To keep Microsoft on its toes.

I wonder who that next company will be--the real big one--that will dethrone Microsoft and Google and Apple. I can't wait, not because I want these corporations to fail, but because it will launch a whole new world :-)
Cringely writes:

I wish these companies had more guts, that either would make a true bet-the-company investment in changing the world, but they won’t. Google engineers are allowed to spend 20 percent of their time on new ideas — yet of those thousands of ideas, the company can really invest in only a dozen per year, leading to dissatisfaction and defections as the best nerds leave to pursue their dreams.

Maybe they’ll leave for the startup that finally topples Microsoft ... or Google. But until then these companies will posture, spend a little money on research and development, and keep each other in check, while reporters and publications pretend that it matters.

Graph of the day

Expect China and India to drag feet on climate intiatives

Visualize this: The temperature outside is 105 degrees, with about 80 percent relative humidity. There is no electricity, which means no air conditioning.

That was my experience on the third day after arriving in Chennai, India’s fourth largest city with a population of more than 7 million.

I suppose I have been spoiled by the temperate conditions in the paradise that is the Willamette Valley, and am no longer able to bear the weather conditions in which I spent the first 22 years of my life. The power supply was restored after a few hours. After a couple of more days in Chennai, I headed to the cooler temperatures of Mysore to, at least temporarily, escape the heat and humidity.

As I was walking around a little after the sun went down in Mysore, everything turned dark because of load shedding in the electric power grid. With the entire area in darkness, the well-lighted Royal Palace stood out as a fantastic spectacle, while being simultaneously a symbol of India’s paradoxical problem of shortages and consumption.

When I wrote in this paper a few months ago about energy and water problems in India, I had no idea I would experience the shortage within a short time. In addition to the power shortage, there are widespread worries about a water shortage because the monsoon has been delayed, and rainfall is expected to be below normal.

A below-normal monsoon might well be the proverbial last straw to this country of a billion, which has managed to weather the Great Recession without too many problems. Agriculture, which is mostly rain-fed, will have significantly lower productivity as a result.

Electrical generation will drop as well with a decrease in hydropower. As will China, India too will ramp up its consumption of coal to produce electricity in order to try to keep pace with the dizzying growth in demand.

That means a larger volume of carbon dioxide emissions from the power plants. And there will be a lot more of carbon dioxide — from automobiles.

One report suggests that automobile sales in India can be expected to double in the next 15 years. Tata Motors, the manufacturer of the much talked about Nano — the $2,000 car — has enough orders to keep it going for years. It is the same Tata that is also the owner of the upscale Jaguar and Land Rover, which it has introduced into the Indian markets.

Meanwhile, Nepali and Indian scientists have been collecting and analyzing data on glaciers and glacial lakes in the Himalayas. Preliminary reports indicate that the lakes have become larger. That is no cause for celebration, because the lakes’ increased size comes from glaciers that are melting.

All these experiences from this trip thus far are valuable indicators of the intense arguments that are forthcoming when the world gathers later this year in Copenhagen for the United Nations Climate Change Conference.

It is clear that the energy needs of India are immense, and they will continue to grow at dizzying rates that will match China’s. We can expect both these countries to continue to state at the conference that advanced countries are higher polluters on a per-capita basis and that they should therefore share a larger burden than the much poorer nations of India and China, which are low per-capita polluters.

I am confident that Bob Doppelt, who has been writing in these pages about climate change issues, will agree with me that India and China will press hard the case that slowing their economic growth rates will not be viewed as feasible, politically or morally.

In a casual dinner table conversation about Chennai’s pollution levels, my parents asked me whether America, too, polluted a lot. It was a tough question in many ways. For one, I was representing America at the table. And as an academic, I am expected to be “neutral” and stick to the facts.

I gave them examples, from places where I have lived, of how America also polluted its way to economic prosperity — from how even the Willamette River was a convenient dumping ground to how Los Angeles used to be even dirtier than it is now.

I added that the old U.S. model is not sustainable. America has got to change its habits, and other countries need to avoid the unsustainable aspects of the American model.

Well, if my dinner table conversation is an indicator, then maybe the Copenhagen meeting will be successful only if it is attended by a lot more mothers.

For The Register-Guard
Appeared in print: Monday, Jul 13, 2009