MY DIAGNOSIS AND PROGNOSIS

My prognosis is very likely to be very good, despite the ominous sounding diagnosis — a small well-defined pancreatic neuro-endocrine tumor (PNET). Today, Thursday, I had surgery at Johns Hopkins to remove it. It wasn’t causing symptoms (that I’m aware of).

A PNET may or may not be cancer depending on your definition of cancer. In any case, it’s not what people normally think of when they hear the word cancer, particularly pancreatic cancer. You can read a “layman’s guide” to PNETs by Matthew Dallek at Slate.

I don’t generally blog about my health, in part since it takes a lot to stop me from blogging, but this is blogworthy, I think for a few reasons:

1. There are many analogies between dealing with early stage climate change and dealing with early stage diseases, analogies I’ve often made myself. As you can imagine, I’ve thought of a few more in the last several weeks.
2. Steve Jobs had a PNET, too, so there is a lot written about them for a general audience — and a lot written about Jobs’ 9-month delay in seeking conventional treatment (i.e. surgery).
3. It is Rare Disease Day. No seriously, click here. If you can’t write about a rare disease today, when can you? [And yes, my surgery was scheduled today purely coincidentally.]

Analogy-wise or coincidentally (take your pick), Hopkins uses a consensus-based approach for cases like mine. So every Tuesday night, one of the doctors presents the case to the entire multi-disciplinary pancreatic cyst team — a big group of gastroenterologists, surgeons, pathologists, researchers, radiologists, and others — and they come up with a recommended course of treatment. [A key reason this team exists is that CAT scans and the like are so good now they pick up a lot of cysts and tumors at an early stage incidentally -- as in my case and Dallek's -- and folks need to figure out what to do with them.]

The doctors say my prognosis is very probably very good — won’t know for sure until they remove and examine it. But then the prognosis was apparently quite good if I didn’t do anything — but there was chance it would metastasize, so the recommendation is to take it out. Can’t argue with the consensus, can you?

So one big difference between this PNET and global warming is that global warming is highly likely to be fatal to a livable climate and modern civilization if left untreated. Still, I think it safe to say  that most people would take it out, but then most people act considerably more risk averse toward worst-case scenarios in their own life than society is acting towards the business-as-usual scenario of  unrestricted emissions of greenhouse gas.

The other reason most folks would take this out is that Steve Jobs delayed removing his. Jobs had a PNET, too, though his may have been symptomatic and functioning (i.e. releasing hormones) and mine does not appear to be (it was discovered incidentally). His was at the head of the pancreas, which required far more extensive surgery. Also, he put off surgery for 9 months doing alternative medicine, which may or may not  have contributed to his death — there is huge controversy over that.

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After a difficult first year in 2011, during which Chevrolet sold a mere 7,671 Volts, sales of the vehicle shot up to a respectable 23,461 car sales for 2012 — driven largely by consumer demand reacting to high gas prices. According to the Washington Post (hat tip to Treehugger) that surge looks likely to continue: General Motors will be upping 2013′s production to 36,000 units.

Able to run on electrical or gasoline power, the Volt — along with other hybrids, electric vehicles, and fuel-efficient cars — has helped boost job growth in the automotive sector in the face of a sluggish economy. This happened despite a storm of right-wing contempt for fuel-efficient automobile technology over the last few years, which focused largely on the Volt as a symbol of President Obama’s (largely successful) attempts to give the American automotive industry a chance to retool itself and get back on its feet.

Since then, overall hybrid sales increased 50 percent in 2012 from the previous model year, sales of plug-in electric vehicles tripled, and GM itself captured 7 percent of the hybrid market — up 2 percent from the year before. And now the company is looking to bulk up its Volt production by 20 percent:

General Motors Co. is planning to build as many as 36,000 Chevrolet Volts and other plug-in hybrids for worldwide delivery this year, 20 percent more than in 2012, two people familiar with the effort said.

GM is planning to build 1,500 to 3,000 of the fuel- efficient vehicles a month, said the people, who didn’t want to be identified because the target isn’t public. GM sold about 30,000 Volt and similar Opel Ampera cars globally in 2012, said Jim Cain, a company spokesman, who declined to give a target for this year.

Chief Executive Officer Dan Akerson has struggled to compete against more successful alternative-power vehicles such as Toyota Motor Corp.’s Prius. The CEO originally touted the Volt’s gasoline-and-electric system as the technology of the future and forecast global Volt sales of 60,000 in 2012, before settling for half that amount.

The 36,000 target is “probably a doable number,” Jim Hall, principal of consultancy 2953 Analytics, said. “It will have a full calendar year in Europe” and GM will probably sell more this year now that the Volt is eligible for the car-pool lane in California, he said.

Admittedly, these numbers remain behind GM’s previous hoped-for targets. It still lags Toyota, which boosted its hybrid sales 70 percent in 2012 over the previous model year, dominating the market with 892,519 sales of its various Prius hybrid models worldwide. The Prius starts at $24,200 — and a subcompact Prius model sells for $19,080 — which undercuts GM’s $39,145 four-seat Volt.

So good news for electric and hybrid cars as a whole, and thus for fuel efficiency and the environment. But less so for the Volt itself.

Still, the Chevy Volt has several factors going in its favor. It was selected as 2011′s North American Car of the Year — with 92 percent of those surveyed telling Consumer Reports they would buy open again. Meanwhile, fuel standards are set to require 54.5 miles per gallon by 2025, technological moves on the horizon promise to make the car’s lithium ion battery technology lighter and more efficient, and there’s every reason to think high gas prices are here to stay.

By Auden Schendler and Jeffrey York via Denver Post

What might you expect to find in communities where “family values” are the strongest? More churches? More parents helping out in classrooms? Maybe more bake sales? Yes, perhaps. But there’s one thing you would definitely find: solar panels.

Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder shows that one modern marker of communities with greater “family interdependence” — a social science term that indicates the value a person places on time spent with their family — is that more new solar energy businesses take root. Further, where state solar incentives are in place, high levels of family interdependence seem to supercharge the effectiveness of those incentives.

These aren’t just weird facts. The information is mind-blowing. It suggests that if government cares about solving climate change, or clean energy jobs, or entrepreneurship, then social norms — the unwritten rules of community conduct — might matter as much as rebates and incentives.

In short, for President Obama to meet his goal of responding to the threat of climate change and sow the seeds of clean energy development, he may not only need to build consensuses in Congress and implement the right economic policies. He might also need to rebuild Mayberry; to increase societal cohesion, neighborliness, family relationships, and community-mindedness. In fact, bolstering civic participation and fostering communities that value family might be just as important as economic policy in fixing climate change.

But this borders on crazy talk. The “family values” people are the very ones who oppose climate solutions; they hate the idea of “social engineering.” Could they, nonetheless, have been on to something? Is there something to our collective nostalgia for Mayberry?

We think so. Perhaps the new businesses we’ll need to help solve climate change can best be encouraged by old values that we’ve lost in a world where “social” means isolating yourself indoors on Facebook. Taking it one step further, maybe one of the reasons we can’t seem to solve climate change is that unaffiliation and non-participation (dodging your neighbor in the driveway so he or she doesn’t get you off schedule) have replaced the cohesiveness of past communities where you knew the paper boy and you didn’t lock the door.

How might we change this?

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Cross-posted from the Center for American Progress.

In his State of the Union address last month, President Barack Obama touted the growth of the American renewable energy sector that has occurred during his time in office—particularly the doubling of “the amount renewable energy we generate from sources like wind and solar.” He pointed out that “Last year, wind energy added nearly half of all new power capacity in America.” These metrics are proof that the renewable energy sector is capable of boosting economic growth while moving us away from the dirty energy sources of the past.

Yet despite the booming expansion of onshore renewable energy facilities, the United States still lags behind many other industrialized countries when it comes to development of a resource that we have in abundance in close proximity to some of our areas of greatest demand for electricity: offshore wind. As we have stood on the sidelines over the past two decades, other countries such as Denmark, the United Kingdom, Germany, and even China have leapt ahead of us, recognizing the inherent value of this strong, commercially viable, renewable resource. As of June 2012, the rest of the world boasted 4,619 megawatts of installed offshore wind energy capacity, while the United States has yet to begin construction on its first offshore wind turbine.

Under President Obama, the Department of Energy announced its intention to close that gap by developing 54 gigawatts of offshore wind capacity by 2030 — more than 10 times the amount currently installed worldwide — and has begun taking proactive steps to achieve this target. In just the past five months, the administration has made major strides toward encouraging renewable energy development on the outer continental shelf. In October the Department of the Interior signed its first lease under the “Smart from the Start” program with NRG Bluewater Wind for a wind farm off the coast of Delaware. In November the department announced the first-ever competitive lease sales, giving multiple companies the opportunity to bid for leases on previously identified “wind energy areas” in federal waters off the coasts of Virginia, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. And In December the Department of Energy announced that it will fund seven offshore wind technology demonstration projects, including Fishermen’s Atlantic City Windfarm in New Jersey; pilot projects in California, the Great Lakes, Connecticut, and Maine; and two turbines off the coast of Virginia.

Despite these advances and pledges of support, critics of the offshore wind industry insist that the technology is too expensive to fully compete with traditional sources of energy — fossil fuels—without massive subsidies. To put that theory to the test, the Center for American Progress, the Clean Energy States Alliance, the Sierra Club, and the U.S. Offshore Wind Collaborative commissioned a study from the Brattle Group — a consulting firm based in Cambridge, Massachusetts — to investigate the costs and benefits of developing a commercial-scale offshore wind industry in the United States.

To date, most studies of offshore wind energy development tended to analyze individual projects, focusing on the specific costs and benefits of building a particular offshore wind farm. Since the next offshore wind farm built in the United States will actually be the first, and first-in-class products or projects of any kind are inherently more expensive, the results of these analyses don’t accurately account for the broader economic impact of developing an entire offshore wind industry the way that the Obama administration and the Department of Energy have suggested. Therefore, we asked the Brattle Group to develop estimates of the overall investment that would be required to develop such an industry in the United States and how that investment would affect the price of electricity. Read more

John Farrell via ILSR

Suddenly everyone knows about Germany’s solar power dominance because Fox News made asses of themselves, suggesting that the country is a sunny, tropical paradise. Most media folks have figured out that there are some monster differences in policy (e.g. a feed-in tariff), but then latch on to the “Germans pay a lot extra” meme. Germans do, and are perfectly happy with it, but that’s still not the story.

The real reason Germany dominates in solar (and wind) is their commitment to democratizing energy.

Half of their renewable power is owned by ordinary Germans, because that wonky sounding feed-in tariff (often known as a CLEAN Contract Program in America) makes it ridiculously simple and safe for someone to park their money in generating solar electricity on their roof instead of making pennies in interest at the bank.

It also makes their “energy change” movement politically bulletproof. Germans aren’t tree-hugging wackos giving up double mochas for wind turbines. They are investing by the tens of thousand in a clean energy future that is putting money back in their pockets and creating well over 300,000 new jobs (at last count). Their policy makes solar cost half as much to install as it does in America, where the free market’s red tape can’t compete with their “socialist” efficiency.

Fox News’ gaffe about sunshine helps others paper over the real tragedy of American energy policy. In a country founded on the concept of self-reliance (goodbye, tea imports!), we finance clean energy with tax credits that make wind and solar reliant on Wall Street instead of Main Street. We largely preclude participation by the ordinary citizen unless they give up ownership of their renewable energy system to a leasing company. We make clean energy a complicated alternative to business as usual, while the cloudy, windless Germans make the energy system of the future by making it stupid easy and financially rewarding.

I’m all for pounding the faithless fools of Fox, but let’s learn the real secret to German energy engineering and start making democratic energy in America.

– John Farrell directs the Energy Self-Reliant States and Communities program at the Institute for Local Self-Reliance. This was reprinted with permission.

In yet another sign of climate change’s decimating effects on Arctic sea ice, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) just kicked off a program to update some of its nautical charts.

As Climate Central reports, routes through the Arctic Ocean have great economic value. They can serve as a shortcut between Europe and Asia, which can save shipping companies many thousands of miles of travel and thus considerable costs. But these passages have generally been blocked by ice, making extensive mapping of the sea floor to guide ships unnecessary.

Now that situation is changing. In 2012, the “minimum extent” for Arctic sea ice — the low point in the cyclical shifts the ice coverage goes through annually — reached a measure lower than any that’s been recorded since scientists began collecting satellite data in the late 1970s. At 3.41 million square kilometers, 2012′s minimum beat out the previous record, set in 2007, of 4.17 million square kilometers. For reference, that drop of roughly 800,000 square kilometers — an 18 percent collapse — constitutes an area larger than the state of Texas.

And with all that melting, the arctic routes are opening up, requiring NOAA to lay down 14 new charts in order to keep commercial traffic along the new paths as safe as possible:

The revisions affect Alaska’s coast, which has America’s only Arctic seafront. As a result of global warming, ice that has historically blocked Arctic waters, even in summer, has been plummeting in recent years, with 2012 ice melting back to the smallest extent since satellite records began. And as sea ice recedes, said NOAA Coast Survey director Rear Admiral Gerd Glang in a press release, “vessel traffic is on the rise.” [...]

Already by 2010, both the Northwest Passage across the Arctic coast of Canada and the Northern Sea Route, across Russia, had been ice-free simultaneously for an unprecedented third year in a row, encouraging a flurry of interest by commercial ship companies. Last summer a Chinese ship navigated the even more reliably frozen route right across the North Pole. [...]

“We don’t have decades to get it done,” said Capt. Doug Baird, chief of the Coast Survey’s marine chart division, in the press release describing the agency’s new Arctic Nautical Charting Plan. “Ice diminishment is here now.”

In fact, the collapse in the coverage area of Arctic sea is a radical shift unprecedented in at least 2000 years, as far as scientists are able to determine. It’s been matched by an equally dramatic drop in the volume of ice — a plunge to one fifth its level in 1980 — that was recently confirmed by the work of Britain’s Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) using the European Space Agency’s CryoSat-2 satellite. At this point, most experts think a completely ice-free Arctic could be a reality as soon as 2030.

Due to feedback loops, global warming actually affects the Arctic faster than other areas. Sea water absorbs much more of the sun’s heat than the relatively reflective ice cover — so as the ice recedes and exposes more of the ocean to sunlight, the ocean temperature rises. That in turn warms the local air, which makes the formation of new, thicker, lasting ice even more unlikely, and the process circles around again.

All this can in turn effect the wider planet: Warmer and and moister air in the Arctic atmosphere can alter the climate patterns that keep frigid air circling northward, along it to plunge south — a possible factor in the extreme winters the Northern Hemisphere has been seeing recently. It can also speed up the melting of glaciers and ice caps in Greenland or the Canadian Archipelago, and even speed up the melting of northern permafrost. That latter result threatens to damage homes, roads and other infrastructure that rests on soil which typically remains frozen. And melting permafrost also promises to release many gigatons of methan, an even more potent — though shorter-lived –greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

Few, if any, observers or lawmakers think a carbon tax is likely to emerge from the gridlocked Congress anytime soon, and the Obama Administration has specifically said it isn’t planning to propose one, yet debate over the idea is becoming louder and more pointed. [Politico]

The National Association of Manufacturers and left-leaning think tank The Brookings Institution locked horns on Tuesday, with each issuing new analyses on carbon taxes that came to very different conclusions.

NAM says a carbon tax would cripple American businesses and not accomplish its goals. Brookings says the tax would be an efficient way to boost federal revenues, drive down greenhouse gas emissions and enable Washington to cut high corporate tax rates.

And Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), ranking member of the Senate environment committee, wants to make sure the White House isn’t interested. In a letter Tuesday, Vitter asked to President Barack Obama to reaffirm his opposition to a carbon tax — and to come out against newly proposed legislation from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.) that would put a fee on carbon.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) has launched a program to update some of its nautical charts, thanks largely to climate change. The revisions affect Alaska’s coast, as ice that has historically blocked Arctic waters has plummeted in recent years. [Climate Central]

An expert witness said Wednesday that BP’s negligence caused the 2010 explosion aboard a Gulf of Mexico drilling rig, killing 11 workers and spilling millions of barrels of oil. [NYTimes]

As U.S. oil and natural gas production booms, the Obama administration’s energy policy has been “fluid” by necessity, according to top White House advisers, and “might not look perfectly pretty from the outside” as it evolves to shifting supply-and-demand scenarios. [Reuters]

U.S. natural-gas production will accelerate over the next three decades, new research indicates, providing the strongest evidence yet that the energy boom remaking America will last for a generation. [WSJ]

Royal Dutch Shell Plc (RDSA) says solar power, a business it abandoned four years ago, may expand into the world’s biggest source of energy in the next half century. [Bloomberg]

Ministers are unnecessarily driving up energy bills for consumers by failing to fully commit to low-carbon energy production, the British government’s official advisers have warned the energy secretary, Ed Davey. [The Guardian]

South Africa delayed introducing a carbon tax until 2015, after objections from metals companies such as ArcelorMittal (MT) South Africa Ltd. and Gold Fields Ltd. (GFI). [Bloomberg]