The disinformation (“Two Google searches ‘produce same CO2 as boiling a kettle’ “) has 869 diggs as of 10 pm EST (see here). It’s already on the first page of Digg Science
My debunking post (retitled “Ignore the hype and keep Googling – it won’t kill the planet“) has 12 diggs — click here to Digg it and set the record straight.
Chu’s Tuesday morning confirmation hearing in front of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee (live webcast here) will also be on C-SPAN 3 (live stream here).
It is must-see TV (see Top 5 reasons Chu is a great energy pick — #1: “It’s not guaranteed we have a solution for coal” and “A Nobelist for Energy Secretary who gets both climate and energy efficiency?“).
For live-blogging, stay tuned!
Another right-wing feeding frenzy, another opportunity to coin a new acronym [see "Diagnosing a victim of anti-science syndrome (ASS)"]. This was first published by the Wonk Room.
The right wing has discovered that Carol Browner, President-elect Barack Obama’s new White House energy and environment adviser, was briefly a member of the Socialist International’s Commission for a Sustainable World Society. The commission first convened in November 2007 to “articulate from the world of progressive politics a way forward to address global environmental concerns, climate change and the issues of governance required to deal with these common challenges” at 10 Downing Street, hosted by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, Leader of the British Labour Party.
Vice President Cheney has long hinted at objections to the Bush administration’s diplomatic engagement with North Korea. If Cheney had his way, “we wouldn’t have had the six party talks,” said former Cheney aide Aaron Friedberg. When the administration decided to take North Korea off the list of state sponsors of terrorism, Cheney hinted at his disapproval, telling Steve Clemons, “I’m not going to be the one to announce this decision.”
In an interview with his biographer Stephen Hayes, Cheney went a step further, indicating his opposition to Bush’s North Korea policy. Asked whether he “celebrates” the administration’s attempt to secure a commitment to end the country’s nuclear weapons program (North Korea is still resisting full nuclear verification), Cheney dodged, “shaking his head” and looking at the floor. “I think I’m going to take a pass,” he said.
Cheney kept resisting. When asked if Bush’s policies were “preemptive capitulation,” he hedged, “Steve, you’ve put me in a difficult position here.” “I’m trying to avoid your question,” Cheney said. Finally, Cheney relented and admitted that he was “not enthusiastic” about Bush’s decision to de-list North Korea:
Q: Was it appropriate to go to them and say, hey, we’ll take you off of this list, given the whole range of their activities that you just outlined?
CHENEY: Well–Lea Anne [Foster, the vice-presidential spokesman] is over there saying, what’s he going to say? (Laughter.)
Q: I’m just thinking of the history books here.
CHENEY: Yes. It’s not a decision that I was enthusiastic about. I don’t make those decisions. I’ve been involved, obviously, in that ongoing debate, but I think the North Koreans have not lived up to their obligations.
Cheney had harsh words for the outcome of Bush’s North Korea policies. “We clearly have not achieved our objective with North Korea, primarily because…they did not give us a full and complete disclosure of their nuclear program as they promised they would,” he stated.
Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice — who has battled with Cheney on engaging North Korea — seems to be more sanguine about Bush’s East Asia legacy. Rice said recently that Bush is leaving Obama with “a pretty good framework” for future engagement with the nuclear power.
Garrett Epps has a very interesting article in The Atlantic making the case that the presidency is simply a poorly designed office as currently conceived. I really recommend that you read the piece. It’s main flaw, I think, is that it partakes in the brand of solipsism that’s all-too-common in the American media. When the Founding Fathers put the constitution together, they made their best effort at canvassing the historical experience of republican governments in finding models and cautionary tales about what to do. But they didn’t have all that many examples to consider. These days, we can do better. There are lots of republics and constitutional monarchies to survey. And my view is that surveying them reveals that pure parliamentary systems (UK, Netherlands, Germany) with an essentially symbolic head of state are superior to presidential (US, Mexico) or semi-presidential (France, Russia, Afghanistan) ones.
Needless to say, though, that’s not very practical. Epps offers, instead, some incremental proposals for reform. One—the biggest no-brainer of the bunch—is to change the electoral system. Another provocative thought is that we ought to formally divide the execute. An odd feature of the US political regime is that at the level of state government we (except for New Jersey) tend to divide executive authority among multiple independently elected officials even though it’s not especially plausible that the governor of North Dakota is going to seize dictatorial authority. But when it comes to the federal government, where abuse of power is a very real fear, we have only one elected officer. Epps suggests establishing the Attorney-General as an independent figure, elected to four-year terms during the off-cycle years—2010, 2014, 2018, etc. Since this resembles the way most states (and, indeed, many counties) work it might go down smoother as a proposal than would a shift to a Euro-style parliamentarism.
Not, of course, that I have any real hope that any of this will be done. The American public and political class are both strangely complacent about institutional issues. There’s a tendency to become really unhappy about political outcomes and processes, but to give almost no thought to the idea that changing the rules that govern our institutions might be a potent way to relieve this unhappiness. Instead, we believe that a change of personnel will eliminate our unease—that George W. Bush will “change the tone” or Barack Obama will restore hope. Obviously, it really does matter a great deal who occupies our public offices. But on another level, if you want to change things you do need to look at the system in which people are operating.
Just as the unemployment rate reaches new heights, a new report from Families USA makes a compelling case for adding a “meaningful subsidy” for COBRA benefits to any economic stimulus package.
For the recently unemployed, COBRA (from the Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation ACT of 1986) extends employer health benefits so long as the recipient pays the full cost of coverage plus an additional 2% administrative fee. As “Squeezed,” Family USA’s report, points out, “average unemployment checks are not sufficient to pay COBRA premiums“:
The prohibitive costs of insurance significantly lower COBRA’s pick-up rate. In any given year, for instance, only 18 to 26 percent of eligible COBRA applicants enroll in extended health benefits, the rest simply forego doctor visits, skip preventive services, or allow chronic health conditions to go untreated.
President-elect Barack Obama has indicated that along with allocating more federal funds to Medicaid and computerizing “all medical records within five years,” his stimulus bill will also provide subsidies to help “recently laid-off workers pay to retain their health insurance through COBRA.” Indeed, including health care funding in the stimulus would not only serve as a down payment on extending affordable health care to all Americans, but it would also create thousands of new jobs and protect American families from financial ruin.
An increase in federal funding for Medicaid through a temporary increase in the federal matching rate for Medicaid, for instance, “will have a measurable effect on business activity, jobs, and wages in every state in the country.” According to the report, “the 10 states that would receive the greatest number of additional jobs because of the temporary FMAP increase are New York, California, Texas, Florida, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Illinois, North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Michigan.”
For the recently unemployed, moreover, having access to affordable health insurance coverage can insulate a family from medical debt and financial ruin. As Families USA concluded, “during these hard times, workers would at least have the peace of mind that comes with knowing that they can get the medical care they need, for themselves and their families.”
Karen Davis, President, The Commonwealth Fund, has more on COBRA expansion.
Some myths are hard to kill. The Times Online “reports“:
Performing two Google searches from a desktop computer can generate about the same amount of carbon dioxide as boiling a kettle for a cup of tea, according to new research.
While millions of people tap into Google without considering the environment, a typical search generates about 7g of CO2 Boiling a kettle generates about 15g. “Google operates huge data centres around the world that consume a great deal of power,” said Alex Wissner-Gross, a Harvard University physicist whose research on the environmental impact of computing is due out soon.
The overhyping of the internet’s energy use goes back a decade, pushed by two right-wing deniers, Mark Mills and Peter Huber. They were actually using their easily-refuted analysis to argue against climate restrictions — I kid you not. In this 1999 press release from the laughably-named denier group, the “Greening Earth Society,” Mills says:
While many environmentalists want to substantially reduce coal use in making electricity, there is no chance of meeting future economically-driven and Internet-accelerated electric demand without retaining and expanding the coal component.
I ended up writing a major report debunking this myth and then testifying in front of the Senate Commerce committee (i.e. John McCain) and the House on the subject. Jon Koomey and others at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) did even more work debunking this nonsense (click here for everything you could possibly want to know on the subject).
There are actually two mistakes in the Harvard calculation. The first, which was the focus of my research, is the big picture issue. What is the net energy consumed by the internet? I argue the internet is a net energy saver — and a big one — since it increases efficiency (especially in things like the supply chain) and dematerialization (it uses less energy to research online than in person). The fact that U.S. energy intensity (energy consumed per dollar of GDP) began dropping sharply in the mid-1990s is but one piece of evidence that internet- and IT-driven growth is less energy intensive.
I, for instance, am able to work at home and telecommute thanks to the Internet and a broadband connection. That saves the energy consumed in commuting and a considerable amount of net building energy: Most people’s homes are an underutilized asset, which consume a great deal of energy whether or not they are there.
The other mistake just involves the more narrow question of how much energy is consumed by Googling. Wissner-Gross says it is 7g of CO2 per search. My LBNL colleagues say that is way too high, and Google itself has rebutted that analysis with their own, which I reprint here:
During the presidential campaign, far-right conservative columnist Ann Coulter made a hobby of criticizing former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee as insufficiently conservative, including claiming that the virulently anti-gay Huckabee was “pro-sodomy.” This past Saturday, when Huckabee hosted Coulter on his Fox News show, he tried to rebut her charges, declaring the he was not “pro-gay”:
HUCKABEE: I am not, as you characterized me in one article, pro-gay, pro-sodomy. That is so not me.
COULTER: Yes, there was a Supreme Court decision. You said you agreed or disagreed with. Yes, I got you on that Mike Huckabee.
HUCKABEE: Nope. You didn’t. I am definitely not pro-sodomy. I promise, scout’s honor.
Watch it:
As ThinkProgress has previously noted, as governor of Arkansas, Huckabee pushed an amendment to ban sodomy in the state in order to “protect the traditional family structure.”
I did a post the other day that used an anecdote from my real life to illustrate a point about the concept of self-defense. Since the point was relevant to the debate over the fighting in Gaza, I tried to explicitly say that I didn’t want the story to be read as an analogy since I don’t believe in trying to conduct arguments by analogy. Well along comes Michael Moynihan to point out that the facts in my story don’t precisely parallel the situation in Gaza.
This, though, is why I don’t believe in analogies. If you make an argument that hinges on an analogy then people fire back by pointing out some respect in which the situation you described isn’t precisely analogous to the thing you’re arguing about. It then becomes a contest to specify the analogy so as to exactly mirror the situation you’re debating. In which case you may as well just debate the situation. Long story short—these analogy fights are stupid.
But to repeat, I wasn’t offering an analogy. I was, rather, offering an example designed to prove a narrow point, specifically that a claim of self-defense doesn’t operate as a blanket license to wreak destruction. Granting that the situation in Israel isn’t identical to the situation on the bike (and the differences cut both ways—the blame in the bicycle case lies 100 percent with the rock thrower, which isn’t the case in the Holy Land) the point is simply that the particular mode of argument that relies on saying “self-defense!” does not, in fact, suffice to vindicate Israel’s actions.
The Associated Press reports that advisers to President-elect Obama “say one of his first duties in office will be to order the closing of the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay. That executive order is expected during Obama’s first week on the job — and possibly on his first day, according to two transition team advisers.” The order would fulfill one of Obama’s key campaign promises in an effort to, as Obama recently explained, “regain America’s moral stature in the world.” Obama raised doubts about his intentions yesterday when he suggested that the closure might not happen in his first 100 days.
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