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Yglesias

How MPG Misleads

By ThinkProgress on Dec 23, 2007 at 1:43 pm

Via Andrew Sullivan, Eric dePlace notes that “You save more fuel switching from a 15 to 18 mpg car than switching from a 50 to 100 mpg car.” And so you do. A 15 MPG car would require 1,000 gallons of gas to drive 15,000 miles while an 18MPG car could get it done in just 833 gallons. That saves 167 gallons of gasoline. By contrast, since a 50 MPG only uses 300 gallons to go 15,000 miles, upgrading to 100 MPG can’t save that much gas — the super-efficient car uses 150 gallons.

One moral of the story is that the MPG statistic is probably misleading a lot of people who aren’t quantitatively sophisticated. In policy terms, meanwhile, the upshot is simply that it makes more sense to focus on raising the efficiency of the least-efficient vehicles than creating new super-cars. Of course, the genius of pricing carbon through a tax or through auctioned emissions permits is, once again, that is spares people the burden of trying to do all the math in our heads and just lets price signals automatically find the most economical way of reaching the targets.

Climate Progress

Yielding the Moral High Ground ” Part II

By Bill Becker on Dec 23, 2007 at 1:24 pm

In Part I, we saw how conservatives were turning their backs on the moral issue of our time–global warming.

Here we’ll examine the many reasons conservatives should share ownership of this issue. Global warming and its solutions involve issues that are important to conservatives, progressives, Independents and even political agnostics. For example:

National security: “Climate change can act as a threat multiplier for instability in some of the most volatile regions of the world, and it presents significant national security challenges for the United States,” 11 retired admirals and generals concluded in a security analysis last April. “The increasing risks from climate change should be addressed now because they will almost certainly get worse if we delay.”

Jobs: The global need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is arguably the biggest entrepreneurial opportunity the United States has known. Billions of the world’s people need access to clean energy, a market of unprecedented scale. Here in the United States, according to an analysis by the Management Information Services in Washington, D.C., energy efficiency and renewable energy can create 40 million jobs by mid-century, at skill levels stretching from entry level to the highly technical.

Competitiveness: Two of the fastest-growing renewable energy technologies today — solar electric cells and wind turbines — were invented in the United States, but we gave up our lead to Japan, Germany and Denmark — and China! We need to get it back. America remains the world’s top innovator; unleashing that talent is a key to our economic security in a post-carbon world. If we want to be the global market leader in green technologies, little steps and tentative leadership won’t do the job. As Sam Walton said in building his business empire: “Incrementalism is innovation’s worst enemy. We don’t want continuous improvement; we want radical change.”

Read more

Politics

Iraq: the ‘greatest American military comeback’ since 1864?

By Amanda Terkel on Dec 23, 2007 at 12:21 pm

In yesterday’s New York Times, Brookings Institution analyst Michael O’Hanlon published an op-ed on the war in Iraq, in which he applauded the historic efforts of his college friend, Gen. David Petraeus:

Are we witnessing the greatest American military comeback late in a war since Sherman’s march to the sea in 1864? [...]

This is largely thanks to the surge-based strategy of Gen. David Petraeus and the heroic efforts — and sacrifice — of so many American and Iraqi troops and police officers.

O’Hanlon joins Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Joe Lieberman (I-CT), who are rushing to declare victory in the war, against the advice of military commanders.

Politics

Giuliani Claims It Would Have Been ‘Impossible’ To Give 9/11 Firefighters Working Radios

By Amanda Terkel on Dec 23, 2007 at 11:22 am

Today on ABC’s This Week, host George Stephanopoulos pushed former New York City mayor Rudy Giuliani on why the radios for the 9/11 firefighters didn’t work. Giuliani dodged the question, claiming that it would have been “impossible” to have given them working radios:

STEPHANOPOULOS: They make two main charges. Number one, that those firefighters in the north tower, many of them lost their lives because their radios didn’t work. They also say you ended the recovery efforts too soon.

GIULIANI: Well, the radios that you’re talking about weren’t put online for three, four, five years after. So, it would have been impossible for me to have those radios ready. It took the city two or three more years…

STEPHANOPOULOS: But they had malfunctioned in 1993.

GIULIANI: But even with the new equipment, it took another two or three years for those radios to be put online. So it would have been impossible for us to have gotten them online before that, given the fact that it took so long afterwards.

Watch it:

As Stephanopoulos pointed out, the firefighters on 9/11 were forced to use old equipment that had malfunctioned eight years earlier, during the 1993 attacks on the World Trade Center.

But it wasn’t “impossible” to get new radios to these firefighters, as Giuliani tried to claim. After the 1993 incident, Giuliani gave Motorola a $14-million no-bid contract. Despite this exorbitant sum, the radios were faulty and had to be taken out of service in March 2001, after a “distress call from a firefighter trapped in a burning house” went unheard. A New York City Council report on the fire department’s radio procurement process concluded:

Thus, despite its acknowledgment two years earlier that several manufacturers were developing technology that might meet FDNY’s CAI specifications, and in apparent disregard of its pledge to evaluate new technologies and products, the FDNY appears to have elected to accept a radio representing an entirely new communications technology from Motorola rather than conduct a competitive review of products and prices.

Brave New Films has put together a video on Giuliani’s record on the 9/11 radios HERE.

Transcript: Read more

Yglesias

Seeds of Conflict

By ThinkProgress on Dec 23, 2007 at 11:04 am

Alissa Rubin and Damien Cave of The New York Times take a good hard look at the Sunni “awakening” strategy and how, shockingly enough, a policy of handing out cash, training and guns to whoever’s willing to work with us could wind up backfiring:

How, when thousands are joining each month, can spies and extremists be reliably weeded out? How can the men’s loyalty be maintained, given their tribal and sectarian ties, and in many cases their insurgent pasts? And crucially, how can the movement be sustained once the Americans turn over control to a Shiite-dominated government that has been wary, and sometimes hostile, toward the groups?

Despite the successes of the movement, including the members’ ability to provide valuable intelligence and give rebuilding efforts a new chance in war-shattered communities, the American military acknowledges that it is also a high-risk proposition. It is an experiment in counterinsurgency warfare that could contain the seeds of a civil war — in which, if the worst fears come true, the United States would have helped organize some of the Sunni forces arrayed against the central government on which so many American lives and dollars have been spent.

Yes, right, exactly. In a society full of rival armed factions contending for power, you can’t achieve peace by just building opportunistic alliances with a whole bunch of separate factions. If our commanders and troops are nimble enough — and they very well might be, as they’ve demonstrated a good deal of nimbleness recently — they may be able to keep playing this dangerous game and keeping the US deployment viable, but it doesn’t really achieve anything. Achieve anything, that is, beyond a welcome reduction in American casualites. But going home would reduce casualties further, faster, and cheaper.

Culture

International Brigades

By ThinkProgress on Dec 23, 2007 at 10:26 am

I had sort of guessed that this “war on Christmas” business was one of those only in America things, but according to Polly Toynbee you’ve got the same BS over in the UK, where the Rev Jules Gomes explains that:

Here is the good chaplain’s Christmas message: “More Christians have been martyred for their faith in the last century than in any other period of church history. Yesterday’s Herod is today’s Richard Dawkins and Polly Toynbee, seeking the total extermination of all forms of Christianity. The great irony is that the greatest opposition to Christ comes from so-called broad-minded people who seek to ban Christmas so that people of other faiths are not offended.”

As I’ve said, I’m not a huge fan of Dawkins’ work in this field but the difference between writing mean books and killing people is pretty clear. And, of course, nobody’s seeking to ban Christmas! It’s weird how so many people want to use this holiday to work themselves and their constituents into fits of anger over nothing. Hardly seems to be in keeping with the spirit of the event.

Photo by Flickr user laffy4k used under a Creative Commons license

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