Opinion-Columns.com

A Tale of Two Editorials

Sebastian Mallaby, the Washington Post columnist, is the go-to guy for subjects slightly off the mainstream and, while I don’t always agree with him, the man has a brilliant mind. Today he’s writing about company brands and how (in this multinational culture of global markets) they’ve become the most valuable corporate asset. Off the books, that is. They’re not found on the balance sheet.

When a company gets bought or sold for way more than its book-value, branding is what they used to call ‘good-will.’ The main point Mallaby makes is that the old template of supporting Coca Cola or Nike by vast advertising campaigns is now vulnerable, as never before, to blogs. Public opinion, actually, but blogs are how public opinion flashes across time and space. Make a misstep public-relations wise and the net will kill you.

The blistering speed with which Mel Gibson was strung-up for his drunken rant is evidence. Mel dares not lie low. Neither do companies that abuse customers. Not any more. The old days of painting LEMON across the side of your car are gone.

Which is very powerful and, in its best examples, a shortcut to progress. As Mallaby points out,

Wal-Mart has promised to double the efficiency of its vehicle fleet and achieve a 30 percent cut in its stores' energy usage. Its motive is not complicated. Internet-enabled critics have assaulted Wal-Mart, and the firm's polling has suggested that 8 percent of shoppers have quit visiting its outlets because of its stance on social issues. An environmental makeover was essential to the brand.

The second editorial on WaPo’s pages today outlines the massive destruction that’s being done by commercial fishermen outside territorial waters. Outside the waters usually defined by a 200 mile distance to the nearest land, is pretty much no-man’s land. It may be subject to international rules and regulations, but for the most part policing is nonexistent.

‘Fishermen’ is in itself a misnomer, as we think of the word. Fisherman conjures up visions of two or three hardy souls in a thirty or forty-foot boat, with families to feed and limited capital as well as opportunity.

Silvia Earle, marine biologist and the chair for Conservation International in Washington, in her article points out that

Mammoth trawl gear with names such as "canyon buster" indicate the colossal scale of the assault and the damage inflicted. In an action akin to bulldozing forests to catch songbirds and squirrels, nets mounted on massive rollers are dragged across the seabed, strip-mining everything in their paths. Sometimes a single trawl tears away as much as 10,000 pounds of sponges, corals, fish and other life from the sea floor, leaving a stark, sterile undersea desert.

The U.N. Division for Ocean Affairs and the Law of the Sea has released a report, and that report yaks about the problems being faced and the need for action. Urgent needs and moratoriums are spelled out, as well as critical habitats and conservation.

Earle accurately points out that the United Nations is in a unique position to act before irreparable damage is done and that the moratorium is opposed chiefly by a handful of countries with fleets of very large fishing vessels.

That’s it, Sylvia, case closed. Nothing, absolutely nothing, short of the United States Navy firing a few shots over the bow, is going to stop fleets of very large fishing vessels. Very large fishing vessels are very large investments, with very large crews and very large profits. Today’s fishing fleets are the national equivalent of the seafaring nations that became world powers off the spice-trade of centuries ago.

Unless, of course, Sebastian Mallaby is right.

The way to go after the environmental chaos created by canyon buster ships is to trace down the brand names that benefit from their catch and get on the net. Not the fish-net, the Internet. In a slightly different incarnation of follow the money, what we need to do is follow the catch, to see what brands from that catch end up on Aisle 7 of the supermarket chains.

According to Mallaby, Wendy's has stopped frying its food in trans fats, which have also been banished from Oreo cookies and Frito-Lay snacks; General Mills makes its Cheerios and Wheaties out of whole grain. In all these cases, companies have responded to public sentiment before regulators compelled them to do so.

Enter commercial fishermen in Google Blog Search and you'll come up with 10,056 entries. Wal-Mart fetches 759,479 individual blogs that mention the merchandizing giant by name. You can pretty well bet that if a Wal-Mart brand of seafood traced back to canyon busters and that link was made public, whole fishery practices would change.

Something’s going on here. It seems to me that it may be more powerful than the United Nations.
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Bio-Mass-Hysteria

Bring me another cup of coffee, Ethyl—I think we’re saved.

“There’s a straightforward way for Washington to end America’s addiction to foreign oil, while reducing greenhouse gas emissions and resolving the impasse on international trade: Turn farm subsides into fuel subsides” So says Lester B. Lave and W. Michael Griffin, both of Carnegie Mellon University.

Well, I like straightforward. God knows, we’ve had little enough of it. Fire away, Les.

“One bushel of corn yields about 2.8 gallons of ethanol. Converting all U.S. corn exports to ethanol would add 4–7 billion gallons of ethanol per year to current production volumes, increasing total corn ethanol production to as much as 11 billion gallons per year. That would easily meet Congress’ new mandate that America produce 7.5 billion gallons of renewable fuels each year by 2012. U.S. annual gasoline consumption is 140 billion gallons and growing. Ethanol could lower that gasoline consumption by 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day—the equivalent to the daily production of an Arctic National Wildlife Refuge-sized oil field. Home-grown ethanol would also help protect Americans against oil-supply shocks and could help reduce the overall U.S. trade deficit by cutting oil spending on the order of $7 to $10 billion per year.”

Unless of course, it’s all hype.

Anyone reading that prognostication by Professor Lave would think the Promised Land had been found in Iowa, behind a six-row picker. Meeting a congressional mandate is the smallest part of the misinformation—Congress has no idea what it has mandated or why or for what purpose, except that it sounded good in an election year when gas prices are driving politicians for cover.

If you’re confused about how corn, which costs about a dollar a bushel more to grow than farmers earn for it, and corn-derived ethanol which takes 29% more fossil energy to produce than it yields, are going to be a help, you haven't listened to politicians. The hype is found in Congress, the White House and the corn-lobby.

The far more inconvenient facts are along the path less travelled at Cornell and UC Berkeley.

Good old King Corn has bestowed upon us industrial agriculture, which has in its turn allowed us to fatten the world’s sickest, most antibiotic-injected and steroid-loaded beef, just to keep supermarket prices low. Taxpayers, you and I, pick up the tab for that buck-a-bushel shortage, to the tune of $4.5 billion each and every year. That $4.5 billion falls directly, without passing Go or collecting $200, to the bottom line of Cargill, Frank Perdue and the rest of the boys.

Switchgrass is the latest switcheroo coming from Washington, if you won’t buy the King Corn premise. Grows anywhere, needs nothing, conserves the soil, makes gasoline faster than you can say freedom from Saudi oil.

Except that it doesn’t.

Switchgrass is a perennial—cut the top and cart it away, the soil gets poorer and poorer. It will grow without fertilizer. Once. It can do without much water, but doesn’t thrive and, to make the quantity necessary to be worth trucking, it needs the same things other crops need. Oh, have we talked about trucking? Switchgrass, like corn, has to be trucked from where it is to where they process it (all at a fuel cost). We pay that cost, so that we can make ethanol using 50% more fossil fuel than the fuel produced.

Excuse me? Takes half again as much energy as it delivers? Sounds like a business plan to lose a little on every transaction, but make it up on volume.

Wood chips and other wood derived biomass sports a 57% energy shortfall, biodeisel from soybeans, negative 27%, using sunflower, minus 118%. Also, vehicles don’t get anywhere near the same mileage on ethanol as gasoline. Also (as if you needed another also), there’s a small matter of the gasoline road tax that will go missing, requiring you and me to come up with an annual $100 billion or so in to keep the highway infrastructure reasonably pothole-free. Thus our Congress, in its mindless enthusiasm and rush to election, has mandated 7.5 billion gallons annually of further deficit nonsense.

In the face of this, good ol’ boy Lester Lave somehow concludes

“By offering farmers a subsidy of $61 per acre for growing switchgrass on farmland that now supports corn, the nation would have a substantial supply of a renewable fuel that starts to cure our addiction to oil. We have a remarkable opportunity to promote free trade, help farmers, preserve farmland, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, and make the United States less dependent on foreign oil. And the best part: It can be done without Washington spending a dime more than it already does.”

Which once again proves the age-old axiom that figures don’t lie, but liars figure.
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Sustainable Mind

Sustainable is the word of the decade, possibly the adjective for an entire century yet to come—a buzz-word, jargon, lingo of the linguists and necessary part of every top-ten, self-help or planetary-help best seller. Necessary hyphenated headline for the hip, the in, the new-age when that term is already old-age.

Whether the word itself is sustainable is yet to be seen.

Certainly most of the nouns for which it serves as modifier are in what Dick Cheney would describe as their ‘last throes.’ Sustainable agriculture? Good luck. Pick your favorite noun, from art to zen, and ask yourself if it’s sustainable. In an increasingly distracted and throw-away world, we’ve all too often ‘moved on from that.’

If something has been lost, the thing we’ve moved on from is the sustainable mind.

My definition of a sustainable mind is one that is able or trained to reflect upon conditions, keep them in focus long enough to draw a conclusion and then defend that conclusion among various alternative possibilities. The ultimate in sustainability is to stay with the subject long enough, often over a period of decades, to shift opinion depending upon new evidence or a change in societal, economic or environmental circumstance.

Not easy. Not the stuff of sound-bites. The brain is local, the mind is not.

Young people, as they always do, represent the most graphic evidence of where society is headed and they are multi-takers of the first order. Raised with iPods plugged in and the other ear to a cell-phone, doing homework (or any kind of stationary work) while simultaneously watching TV, listening to music and text-messaging, they are the new edition of the human animal.

It’s not an accident that society no longer hears, except in the short bursts of sound-bites. Not surprising that war is insupportable unless quickly won. Drowning in information, unable to listen in the constancy of messages, we've moved on. America (and maybe the world) lost interest in Iraq. Who really cares for the Abramoff story and which congressman may or may not be connected to his chain of legislation by payoff. President as liar, it’s old news. Tell me something new. Today is a blizzard of events that buries yesterday.

Over half the humans that have ever been born on this planet are alive today. 95% of everything created by human hands has been created in the past 100 years.

Turn off the iPod and the TV to reflect on that for a moment. Those realities mirror the overwhelming expanse of numberless stars that so excited our imaginations as kids on a summer night, gazing into infinity.

Reflecting on the recent (for it is recent) loss of the sustainable mind, who is there to reach for in explanation but Darwin? The evolutionary pace of the animal world, which includes our species, is relentless but it is slow. A thousand years to learn a skill, a million to seek the refuge of a cave, two million to come back out again to agriculture.

Yet the lightning eyewink of two hundred years has thrust us from a life on horseback into and through ever shorter ages; agricultural, industrial, flight, space, computers and the wizardry of the time-payment plan. Technology may have run right over the top of our ability to cope with it—or even recognize ourselves as trampled.

From writers, artists and musicians to lawyers, scientists and hedge-fund managers, we embrace the solitude of abandoned beaches in the Caribbean and mountain cabins. Never too far away from a good restaurant, mind you and close to satellite-access to the Internet, if possible, but places where the mind can linger for a moment or a week or a month. Our nostalgia for ‘life in the slow-lane’ may not predate air conditioning or antibiotics, but it pants at our feet like a friendly dog.

There are those who hunger for Walden Pond and those who are unexpressed without a motorcycle, a second career, a third wife and the mad desire to hang-glide if they can work that into a ballooning vacation. Like many, I want some of each. Like others, I wonder at the race to more income than can be reasonably spent.

The sustainable mind makes us wonder, the unsustainable makes us want—or so I have come to think.

Nothing wrong with wanting. It’s made of us a wondrous society and (until recently) the envy of the world, the place most think of when ‘opportunity’ of any kind or dimension comes up in conversation. But, just as ‘high-tech’ has come to value the benefit of a balancing ‘high-touch,’ it may be that ‘wanting’ needs the symmetry of reflection, the hammock-time out of the busyness of business. Enough sustained mind to settle in on and establish the price we are willing to pay for wanting.

I am fond of saying you can have anything, but you cannot have everything. The first and foremost anything I would hope to have, is a sustainable mind. From that, all else comes.
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An Exciting Example of Assertive Action

"God help me, before I assert again!" The Washington Post has just fallen all over itself, praising the most environmentally abusive administration since—since?—well, since no other, because none in our history has done so much to deface, destroy, defame and deregulate this nation’s ecological laws.

In what they call ‘an exciting example of assertive action,’ the Post continues to gush,

“What's impressive is not just the designation itself but the fine print of President Bush's order. Despite tenacious pressure from regional fisheries managers, Mr. Bush decided not to permit any commercial fishing in the area. The small amount that goes on now will be phased out; a coalition of private donors will buy out the fishing permits of the eight fishermen who currently work those waters. What's more, in a happy surprise, Mr. Bush used his power under the National Antiquities Act to designate national monuments, not the more cumbersome federal marine sanctuaries law. As a result the plan goes into effect immediately, bypassing months of additional bureaucratic wrangling.”

Months of bureaucratic wrangling hardly suits the timeline for the November mid-terms.

In another ‘happy surprise,’ designating the area a National Monument avoids any Congressional actions that might illuminate just how much George bought and how little he paid. In the payment department, he bravely stomped all over eight native Hawaiian fishermen whose catch was in serious decline. The man's just full of happy surprises, according to WaPo.

“Bring ‘em on.”

In the buying area, he got to affix his name to the largest protected marine area in the world and scrape the mud off his environmental shoes at the same time. Some sycophant in the Congress (before the Republicans lose control of it) is bound to suggest the area be named for Bush. Pardon me while I vomit.

Not to be outdone in the editorial feeding frenzy, the New York Times effused, (my parentheticals)

“An unfamiliar but highly appealing (gag) side of President Bush showed itself at the White House yesterday. It was Mr. Bush the compassionate conservationist (choke), friend of green sea turtles, seabirds and Hawaiian monk seals (oh, come now), savior of coral reefs and spiny lobsters, creator (read that co-opter) of the largest ocean sanctuary on the planet.”

I have a long-time acquaintance who is both cheap and grumpy about his cheapness, to the point that it embarrasses all who know him. He’s rich, to boot, which doesn’t make the whole scene any more appealing. Once every year or two, he’ll take his wife to dinner and a movie and she out-gushes both the Washington Post and the New York Times combined, raving over how generous he is. There should be a word for that characteristic he shares with his president. In the absence of one, I will coin such a term.

Disingenuous already exists, a delightful and accurate word that means ‘not straightforward or candid; giving a false appearance of frankness.' My term is disingenerous and my personal definition is ‘not generous; buying the appearance of generosity, only when the price is low enough to be meaningless.’

There is no oil in the area of the Bush designation. He wouldn’t know a Monk seal if it swam into his bathtub, but he knows a cheap legacy when he sees one and that is the most sickening aspect of his opportunism. The Times prostrates itself, raving that the designation is

“an act of wilderness preservation that, acre for acre, instantly put him into the same league as the conservation-minded presidents Theodore Roosevelt, Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton.”

In some ways, Mr. Bush's decision was supremely easy — the end of commercial fishing will affect only eight fishermen. But even so, the mind reels a little at what Mr. Bush has done. The Northwestern Hawaiian Islands are a vast place few Americans have ever visited or ever will. But they are being protected anyway — not for divers, fishermen or cruise ships, but for their own sake, for science and forever. Mr. Bush made exemplary use of presidential power yesterday. We hope he does more of it.”

Yep, the mind reels all right. In a single Karl-Rove instant, the most destructive, undoing, privatizing president in the nation’s history has been voted a place on Mount Rushmore, compliments of the New York Times and Washington Post.

Assertive (inclined to the bold and confident, aggressively self-assured) action is this president’s long suit. Among the prior Bush assertions,

• Victory in Afghanistan (then a mysterious loss of interest)
• Weapons and relationships that did not exist in Iraq, in order to take us to the war of his choice
• The worthlessness of global efforts to curb air and water pollution
• A critical and immediate need to stop taxing the rich
• A similarly high priority to cut back programs for the poor
• "We do not torture" (famous, along with "Bring 'em on.").
• A love of God that somehow misinterprets all His better instincts
• Victories where there are none, progress through regression and a conservatism of waste through deficit spending

Karl Rove is as much a political genius as the NYT and WaPo are dupes and suckers. Unfettered by any worry over indictment, Karl is likely to pull-off or outright steal another Republican victory in November. The country, behind the strong leadership and editorial insight of The New York Times and The Washington Post, those paragons of the public trust, will once again be delivered.

Signed, sealed and delivered.
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Teddy Kennedy’s Suicide Squeeze

Who knew Teddy had it in him? He doesn’t play anymore, but the old war-horse managed the game that took wind-farming off his Cape Cod horizon, The synergy that prompted Kennedy’s brilliant suicide squeeze to win the series caught everyone with their gloves up—who would have known?

That’s what makes great politicians. That willingness to achieve your personal goals by draping them in the American Flag. It's a Kennedy tradition. Who says Camelot is dead?

Backing up to Teddy’s ‘view’ of wind energy, back in February he got Rep Don Young from the neighboring state of Alaska (isn’t that close to Massachusetts?) to tie up the proposed energy project by--get this—claiming it screwed up shipboard radar.

“Public opposition to wind farms on the Cape claims to be based mainly on worries that they will spoil seascapes and have detrimental effects on birds, marine animals, and their habitats. Other groups (does that mean non-public opposition?) have expressed concerns about the potential impact on sailors and important commercial fisheries.”

A proposed Navy sonar base off North Carolina that makes dolphins crazy and causes whales to beach themselves is a ‘no problem’ to the Defense Department, but according to Kari Lydersen’s article in the Washington Post

“that project and at least 11 others have been halted by the DOD as it studies whether the projects could interfere with military radar.”

“The Defense Department study was put in the 2006 Defense Authorization Act -- inserted, say wind farm developers, by senators who want to block Cape Wind.”

From ship radar to military radar to any kind of radar at all is a short hop for those defense guys and now the FAA is in the game. Possible hazzards to military radar in Wisconsin, North Dakota, South Dakota and Illinois, all of which received "proposed hazard" letters from the Federal Aviation Administration saying the projects must be halted pending the Defense Department study. Anyone got an idea of how high this is on Rummy's to do list these days?

Nice job, Teddy.

Kennedy, who claims to be an environmentalist, until projects like Cape Wind get to close to various ‘Kennedy compounds,’ has (by his own personal and stupid willfulness) shot down at least a dozen such projects nation-wide. This, as he trumpets his environmental sensitivity on his web site;

“Senator Kennedy has been a vocal advocate for environmental concerns throughout his career in the Senate. He has worked to protect natural resources, and to develop alternative energy sources. His approach to environmental issues is wide-ranging, from encouraging the study of the Outer Intercontinental Shelf to supporting efforts to reduce vehicle emissions to working vigorously to prevent drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He has pushed to maintain high environmental standards, even as the Bush Administration has sought to undermine longstanding regulations.”

Horsefeathers.

The Kennedy-Young bunt has virtually stopped dead in their tracks, various environmentally sensitive wind-turbine projects across the country, for the sole purpose of furthering a Kennedy ‘not in my back-yard’ mind set. The WaPo article points out;

“The FAA has received more than 4,100 wind turbine applications so far this year, compared with about 4,300 in 2005 and 1,982 in 2004. An offshore wind farm of as many as 170 turbines is planned in the Gulf of Mexico off South Padre Island, Tex. The $2 billion project will generate enough electricity for 125,000 homes. At meetings in Madison, Wis., and Toledo this month, industry and government officials will discuss an offshore wind farm in the Great Lakes.”

They can discuss until Teddy Kennedy’s cows come home, but the FAA can’t be gotten around.

“Sen. Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.) said the Defense Department study could have a chilling effect on the development of wind power nationwide. A June 2 letter to the Defense Department signed by Durbin and five other Midwestern senators said, "Since much of the nation is in radar line of sight, this interim policy has a sweeping effect." It noted that multiple wind farms are already operating in the radar line of sight of military and Homeland Security installations, "without any problems that we are aware of."

Mark Jacobson of Invenergy LLC, the company developing the Forward Wind Energy Center in central Wisconsin, points to the Horse Hollow Wind Energy Center near Dyess Air Force Base in Abilene, Tex.

"There are half a dozen Air Force sites that have wind projects next to them," he said. "There seems to be little consistency in how they're identifying whether a project is impacting a radar site or not. It's a wide net being cast out to stop any project in its tracks until this study is complete, and there's no clear deadline being adhered to for the study."

Teddy is joined in his criticism of Cape Wind, by Sen. John W. Warner, Republican from Virginia, so you can see it’s a genuine bi-partisan problem. These senators, who don’t give a rat's ass about whale beaching and the problems of other water-mammals that are sensitive to sonar, said Cape Wind will hurt views, tourism and migratory birds. We can’t have that.

Note #1; whales are migratory as well, the largest mammals on the planet.

Note #2; Senator Warner (along with Teddy) has a home on Cape Cod. But hey, we’re all in this together, right?
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Four-Dollar Gasoline? Get Over It

America can accept CEOs making (not earning, making) $18,500 an hour and hardly blink an eye at paying $4.50 for a Starbucks Frappuccino. No one takes much notice, rummaging for their size among the piles of $250 designer jeans or questions why Nike rakes in over a hundred bucks for their middle-line running shoes.

But let gasoline hit $3.50 a gallon and Congress falls all over itself making asinine proposals and President Bush asks for permission from that same over-wrought Congress to mandate mileage requirements for automobiles.

Permission?

This is the same president who ran down Congressional oversight in his SUV when he wanted to sic the FBI on Americans’ phone calls, so I guess we know how serious he is. The same president who interpreted some 750 laws the Congress made, any way that he felt like.

Argggghhhhhhhh!!! Get over it, people!

America is the last industrialized country on the face of the earth where gasoline is cheap. Iraq, where lots of it is produced and has long been subsidized by the government, gets about two-bits a gallon, unless we buy it over there from Halliburton and then it’s ten times that, but you’ll have to ask Dick Cheney why, ‘cause I don’t know.

Europe has been paying $5 to $7 a gallon for decades now and part of the legacy of that is excellent public transportation across the continent. Cheap gas in America bought us Amtrak, strip-malls, two-hour commutes and socially isolated suburbs where the kids have nowhere to hang out but the malls.

It also bought us a ruined automobile manufacturing industry, total energy dependence, a severely degraded environment and screwball economics.

Band-wagons were everywhere in Washington, being jumped on

• George Bush is using the ‘gas crisis’ as additional evidence for the need of extended tax giveaways to the rich. How the two are connected is anyone’s guess.
• Congress was going to give us a hundred bucks to fill up, until they were laughed off their announcement podium. Sen. Jim Talent, declaring, "It will show people that Washington gets it," only confirmed how much they don’t get it. But Republicans are desperate to beat Democrats to the gift counter, so we can expect something before November.
• A few conservative Republicans dropped their pants, as well as their ‘philosophical opposition’ to tax hikes. Philosophy is the first thing thrown overboard in an electoral storm. They suddenly began complaining loudly about oil companies and the auto industry.
• Last week, Bush talked about diverting oil from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve. “No, no,” he claimed, “this is not the political stunt I accused the Democrats of two years ago, this is my political stunt.”

The wagon with no band on it is Senator Pete Domenici’s encouraging the development of renewable fuels and hybrid vehicles. Pete is twenty to thirty years late with that and he’s been in the Senate, representing New Mexico for 34 years, so what’s the excuse, Pete?

The other reason Pete’s great ideas won’t work is the fix has to be in time for November’s mid-term elections and renewable fuel research is a little further away than most Congressional horizons. Ditto Ford, Chrysler or GM rolling out a workable hybrid.

Global warming, skyrocketing deficits, kids getting killed in Iraq, the FBI and CIA spying on Americans and our president reading Congressional law creatively, are all things that can be talked around and spun this way or that. We’re not likely to go to war with Iran before November, even George isn’t dumb enough to do that. But the sabers will be mightily rattled, enough to scare those on the edge of withholding their vote to come into compliance. That stuff can be handled.

What maybe can't be handled is that Americans are mightily displeased about the cost of filling up their cars. Republicans promised there wouldn’t be a crisis, that we could keep on buying those SUVs and now, here we are, in deep doo-doo big-time.

What’s at stake in this mid-term is control of Congress. If Republicans can't hold on to that, Democrats are going to establish investigatory commissions, pull the rug out from under all that administrative stone-walling and wreck any chance Bush has to save his legacy, whatever the hell that means. He may well be indicted. Rabbits will be pulled from hats.

What needs to happen is Congress slapping on an additional buck-a-gallon federal tax. That would bring gasoline to around $4.50 a gallon, still $2 below Europe and the rest of the realistic world. Consumption would drop, alternative energies would blossom, the national debt would be brought under control and the nation would benefit. But it would take courage, foresight and statesmanship and all of those attributes are woefully short in this Congress or administration.

Consider that the average driver in America clocks 12,000 miles a year on the family sedan and that his mileage averages 24 mpg. That’s 500 gallons of gas or diesel a year. At $1.25, it costs him $625.00 and at $3.25 his fuel bill jumps to $1,625.00. An extra grand a year. Not the end of the world as we know it.

If the Fed slapped another buck in taxes, his total extra load would be $1,500.00.

Instead of that, our president and our Republican Congress is extending Bill Gates’ and Ted Turner’s tax breaks. That will cost you tens of thousands in deferred deficits and won’t run your car an extra block and a half. But when that bill comes due, George Bush, Pete Domenici, Trent Lott, Dennis Hastert and Bill Frist will no longer be in office.

Who ya gonna call, Ghost Busters?
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More about Conservative Politics at my opinion columns web site.

The Good Hands People are Washing Their Hands

That enormous sucking sound you hear down around the Gulf Coast, isn’t floodwater receding, it’s insurers heading for higher ground.

Just Like a Good Neighbor, State Farm Is (no longer) There.

You’re In Good Hands With Allstate, unless those hands happen to be in hurricane or earthquake territory.

These two major insurers have had enough and you can’t really blame them. In about a month, another hurricane season is scheduled to hit or miss Ol’ Miss and these companies have shareholders to worry about.

That might sound callous. It’s business. Add local State Farm or Allstate agents to the small businessmen ravaged by the first ballots cast under a new regime called Climate Change. George Bush has been right all along. We desperately need regime change, it’s just that he’s been after the wrong regime.

There are going to be some hard words slung in the direction of insurers. They are correct in what they are doing and we need to take notice, change some things around, and the first thing to look at is Gulf Coast development. Trent Lott is not God. Not yet, anyway.

Since we have spent decades and, in some cases, centuries revamping, re-arranging, weeding out and filling in nature’s buffers along the Gulf, we came to think somehow that it mattered. It doesn’t.

Having spent those same decades and, in some cases those same centuries building a social and economic order in New Orleans, establishing a truly great example of superior culture in a hundred different ways (with several glaring deficiencies), we thought and expected it would last. It hasn’t.

We spent a much shorter period, mostly the past two decades glitzing a painfully susceptible Mississippi coast in LasVegas style. The money and power behind that travesty calls on the National Treasury to fish their chestnuts out of the fire. Assuming (and it’s a big assumption) that Trent Lott fails in his efforts to scam relief funds, the National Treasury will have more sense than that.

It may not.

God knows, government continues to fail us with saddening regularity and this may be just one more example. We are, quite accurately, shareholders in this nation of ours, certainly every bit as much as those who elect to invest in State Farm or Allstate. The difference is that our investment was thrust upon us rather than voluntary. We haven’t the option to sell-short in a down market and, largely because of this, the Trent Lotts in our government would have us heal their wounds rather than take the loss they set themselves up for.

Joe Annotti, of the Property Casualty Insurers Association of America, says

"It's a political problem, and it's an economic problem -- that's what makes it so difficult."

Dead wrong, Joe. It’s an actuarial problem. That’s what insurance is based upon, actuarial projection and the projections say we’re getting warmer and stormier and far more vulnerable in a climate that shows no retreat from increasing chaos.

Americans surely hate defeat. Our first instinct is to rebuild the damned place, march down into the jaws of whatever nature can throw our way and tough it out, make it work. That very brand of Americanism is what Congress responded to with tens of billions in relief. They do a lot of things badly in Washington, but they have ears to hear when the Anthem plays.

Unfortunately for the hundreds of thousands out of work and out of their homes along the ravaged coast, Congress and the relief agencies have been damned slow to do anything useful other than shuffle paper. Unfortunate as that may be, it’s a revocable investment and ought not to be made blindly. The Dust Bowl of the thirties displaced an entire area of our country and they never returned, made lives in other states, shook it off and moved on.

It won’t make me popular to say it, but the Gulf Coast is our era’s Dust Bowl. Time to pack it up, pull it down, restore what can be restored and let nature have its way, a way that we’ve done much to enhance.

The Gulf of Mexico will rise substantially over several decades, the hurricanes will get larger and stronger and Trent Lott’s casino strip will be but an abandoned breaker against the waves. Katrina put the federal flood insurance program $23 billion in the red and that money is a mere drop in the bucket of future liability. So, we’re substantially left with two options along the ravaged Gulf Coast

• Put our money on red and spin the wheel with Trent
• Or pay attention to where less self-serving interests have gone and follow State Farm and Allstate out of town.

If the casinos, resorts, private homes and businesses can afford unsubsidized insurance, good for them. What Mississippi, Louisiana, Texas, Florida, the Carolinas and Georgia dare not ask, is for the federal government to continue to hedge their private bets in the face of sure disaster. We’re $125 billion down at the table in Trent's casino and a month away from the annual hurricane season.

The smart money’s cashing in what chips they have left.
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More environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Outraged Against Themselves, Congress Throws a Tantrum

Like little kids in the check-out line, holding their breath ‘till they’re blue in the face so mom will buy them gum, Congress and the President are outraged, apoplectic, appalled, indignant, offended, shocked and scandalized by gas prices at the pump. A national disgrace, time to convene a committee, appoint a prosecutor, appear on the Today Show and 60 Minutes . . . anything, absolutely anything except take the blame.

The answer, of course, is to do what mom always did. Wait until breathing begins again, stuff their little quivering bodies in the back seat and drive home. Three things that one must never do; buy the damned gum, feed the animals at the zoo or take congressional outrage seriously.

Exxon just posted a record quarterly income. The Congress just posted a record quarterly deficit. Exxon just earned nearly $10 billion and the un-indicted co-conspirators who run our national government pissed $100 billion down the drain, both of them in the past 90 days. Guess which one has the Senators and Representatives ranting on every talk-show they can book?

You have to be older than fifty to have any recollection of the Great Oil Price Run-Up of 1973, when Jimmy Carter put on a sweater and lost a second term. Carter was too honest for the job, but America learns fast and we don’t elect honest presidents anymore. We are in the era of DreamWorks politicians these days and it’s much more entertaining to convene a congressional committee in front of a Washington gas station than it is to take the blame.

DreamWorks politicians

• Gave us SUVs, Hummers, pickup-trucks, the return of the muscle-car and a bankrupted automobile industry.
• Played off the Middle-East countries against one another, armed them to the teeth, supported the oppression of their underclass and looked the other way as crude eased its way from $2 to $70 per barrel.
• Failed in all the ways it is possible to fail, to encourage any form of transportation other than the individual automobile.
• Financially supported (and by tax policy encouraged) endless suburbanization that depended on the car for access.
• Worked to defeat or marginalize every possible form of alternative energy development.

And now, they’re on the floor, kicking, screaming and red-faced, insisting as Claude Rains did in Casablanca, insisting that we ‘round up the usual suspects.’

And no one laughs. This great American comedy is playing out across the country and not a chuckle in the house. Come on, Bostonians, where’s your sense of humor? You there in Chicago, birthplace of Saturday Night Live, have you no sense of irony? Out there in the West, where the oil-wells flow, is there no joy in last year’s $42 oil coming out of the ground at $70 and not a penny added to cost of pumping?

Exxon isn’t the problem, folks. Your DreamWorks government is the problem, Exxon is just unavoidably enriched by thirty years of idiotic Washington’s self-serving policies. We have contrived a war in the land of oil. We have smashed blindly at the hornet’s-nest of a cartel that no longer needs us and blame our local gas station for being stung.

It’s over. Crude will move fractionally from time to time, but inexorably upward, well above $100 a barrel and probably in excess of that over twenty years. The wealthy will drive, the rest of us will rent cars for special occasions or vacation trips. Wal-Mart will re-invent the peddler-wagon and come to you when you can no longer go to them in sufficient quantity.

We’ll finally get bullet-trains down the medians of the Interstate roads and we’ll do it whether or not the private automobile survives. We’ll do it because no commuter in their right mind will be willing to spend two to three hours of their daily life in jammed traffic.

But it would have been nice if we’d not been so gulled. It would have been intelligent and useful, pleasant and agreeable to have designed our suburbs with light rail, commercial centers and local schools. Our kids would like to be off the two-hour schoolbus as much as we would like to be off the two-hour commute.

We could have used alternative fuels, alternative transport, alternative housing, schools and planning in this concreted, asphalted nation we have devised. And there was time, plenty of time. Thirty years wasted. The Interstate highway network was built in ten.

Now the government that provided no alternatives, leaves us no alternatives and blames Exxon.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Mowing Down a Marketing Bonanza

It’s such fun watching American manufacturers shoot themselves in the foot. They do it with such dedicated focus.

Mr. Briggs and Mr. Stratton fired up their opposition to California’s lawnmower emissions control legislation instead of seeing it for what it is, the golden opportunity to market the hell out of the environment. Green machines! Nah, too much trouble. Wal-Mart wouldn't like it. Too costly, no one’ll buy ‘em.

California, which may as well be another country because of it’s opposition to dirty internal-combustion engines, is having none of it. In answer, Briggs and Stratton merely dialed up their lobbyists, whispered in a couple Senatorial ears and hunkered down. John Shiely is B&S CEO, a nice, young, well-turned-out Brooks Brothers type fellow with the well-bred Milwaukee reverence for the bottom-line.

According to a NYTimes article by Felicity Barringer, Briggs and Stratton’s all-new and highly polished 2006 line of engines is almost a hundred times as polluting (gallon per gallon) as today’s calalytic-converter equipped automobiles. A golf-ball sized small-engine catalytic-converter would add about $20 to $25 to the cost of the engines and solve the problem.

Twenty-five bucks to agreeably meet standards they’ll have to knuckle under to anyway, not all that far down the road. Shiely ought to give Chrysler, GM or Ford a ring to see how well they made out trying to stiff-arm the EPA. Of course it’s not just lawnmowers. Briggs and Stratton engines are found on leaf-blowers, golf carts, generators, outboard engines, chainsaws, rototillers, small tractors, weed-eaters, snow-blowers, jet-skis and irrigation pumps, to name what immediately comes to mind.

All this great stuff, all polluting, all fixable, all a great marketing opportunity—but John Shiely claims it ain’t easy being green. Muppet mentality strikes again. When all else fails, haul out the China threat. Senator Christopher Bond, B&S’s Washington shill, argues that tightening small-engine standards nationally would take 1,750 jobs from his constituents and send them to China.

As we all know, China is the world’s most efficient maker of golf-ball sized catalytic-converters. According to the Senator, moving this critical function to Asia is tantamount to destroying the PGA Tour (I made that up), killing off yet another great American industry and decimating the employment of Bond’s Missouri constituents He’s not having any, thank you very much.

Not so long as he chairs the committee that controls the budget of the EPA.

All over golf balls, or things the size of golf balls, or thingys that cost about the same as a dozen golf balls. Who would have thought that a worldwide engine provider such as Briggs and Stratton was so horribly vulnerable? My god, it’s Harley Davidson all over again. Or not. It’s so confusing when we get Brooks Brothered. Possibly John can slip down the road and have lunch with Jim Ziemer at Harley and ask how they were able to afford converters, still kick Yamaha’s butt and stave off those vicious Chinese motorcycle builders.

What’s at stake in California is a pending regulation that would tighten emission requirements for small engines, Briggs engines, Stratton engines. Cutting 22 tons of smog-forming chemicals from the California air daily, or the equal of  800,000 cars per day, give or take a few.

That sounds reasonable on the face of it. That sounds like something a major green-machine ad campaign could be built around. That sounds like consumers wouldn't be able to get around the law by buying a non-Briggs, non-Stratton mower or outboard motor. Shiely and Bonds think it only sounds that way, that far murkier plots against American industry are afoot.

So, if John Shiely can just figure out how to convince all those chainsaw and jet-ski buyers out there that twenty-five bucks is a good investment and if he can de-claw Senator Bond and if he can just buy the little converters from China instead of having them ravage yet another American company . . . then, maybe we can all sigh in relief, mow our lawns and weed-eater a little around the picnic-table without destroying the world as we know it.

Whoops, small item I nearly missed from Barringer’s article:

“But four small-engine makers say that their engineers have figured out how to meet the pollution standards safely, with or without the devices.”

We can only hope those four are not Japanese makers. We’ve been there, done that, got the tee shirt some thirty years ago and lost our auto industry. Not because Detroit couldn’t make efficient, well-made cars, they've long since proven their ability to do that.

But because they wouldn’t.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Welcome to International Politics, to Deal With China, Press 9

The exuberant, yet somewhat Indian-accented voice instructs;

• To complain about lost jobs, press 1
• To discuss human-rights, press 2
• To argue trade issues, press 3
• To buy latest CD, A Bigger Bang (Rolling Stones) $1.13 in caselots, press 4
• To inquire about intellectual-property issues, press 5
• To re-invent your company in China at incredible cost-savings, press 6
• To facilitate this through the Wal-Mart 12-step program, press 7
• For a re-mastered photo of you, holding back the tank on Tiananmen Square, press 8
• To deal with China on all other issues, press 9

Unfortunately, President Bush doesn’t have these options available to him as Chinese President Hu Jintao visits Washington this week, but it won’t much matter. Anyone who thinks anything substantive comes out of Alpha Dog to Alpha Dog discussions, is hopelessly naïve. Those issues have already been fought over, chewed on, threatened about, pleaded, coerced and ultimately negotiated as best our country could from its traditional position of weakness.

Thus the headline and press-conference after the State Dinner will showcase two leaders, each of them smiling, each putting the best face on what was agreed, neither of them surprised.

Traditional weakness? America? Yeah, these are two great nations, improbably joined at the hip, China dependent upon exports, America, imports and financing of our national debt. The United States moving from largest investor nation to largest debtor nation is a big-time weakness. The value of the dollar has dropped like a rock, 30% internationally during these past six unfunded years of war and tax relief. At any rate, neither country comes to this meeting entirely comfortable with the obvious and necessary see-sawing priorities.

Decades ago, we told China it had to become more Western, embrace Western culture and develope a capitalistic worldliness to raise the standards of their impoverished people.

So, they took the American model, undervaluing their currency (something we once did with slavery), setting their worker-class against their agricultural class (a feat we accomplished with mechanization), causing enormous environmental damage (as did our lumber, industrial and mining industries) and wrapping the entire package in dodgy legalities (as with our union-breaking and waves of immigrant labor).

Now, as we look at what China has wrought in our likeness, we find it’s not as pretty a picture as we would like it to be. Nor has it found a way to provide the cheap goods Americans demand without takingour  jobs and ignoring copyrights. As Ann Landers always said, there ain’t no free lunch.

As a practical matter, we are helpless. The bill sponsored by Senators Charles Schumer and Lindsey Graham to impose a 27.5 percent tariff on imports of Chinese goods, until they see certain things our way, won't happen. It plays well to the voters, but is prevented by China's membership in the World Trade Organization. We are members as well and the WTO precludes members from imposing unilateral tariffs on other members. Pffffttt! Sorry, Charlie and Lindsey.

We are further made helpless because China holds so much of our paper debt. We’re at an all time high right now in taking on that debt and there aren’t that many players in the let's-finance-America game any more. The oil-rich nations are tending toward Europe and Asia at the moment, watching Iraq and Iran with a wary eye.

So it seems this dance of only marginally suitable partners will go on.

Until it suits China otherwise. And it will. China will mature as a producer-nation, as Japan and Korea have matured. Their labor force will mature as well, amidst rising wages and the creation of a more abundant Chinese middle-class that demands consumer products on a truly massive scale.

And that is the real question mark in future Chinese-American relations, the what happens as their consumer-economy develops and comes into play? But don’t kid yourself that there will be any unexpected ‘breakthroughs’ in two huge economies that are individually unstable for different reasons.

And have such potential for mutual economic destruction.
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More at my personal web site about what interests me in International Affairs.

‘Selective’ Freedom of Speech?

We have Marlboro ‘lights’ and ‘lite’ beer (for those who don’t know how to spell) and so I suppose it’s only natural that we should be introduced to free speech ‘light.' Pre-washed like jeans, pre-shrunk to fit our sense of inquiry pre-positioned to get us thinking the right thoughts in this time of mid-term pre-election.

Spin used to mean the way you told the story. Now, chapter and verse is spun clear out of it. If that’s not possible, a line-item mark out takes place with black Magic Marker. A whole new meaning for line-item veto.

This complications of global warming have become so confusing that even George Will can’t seem to make sense of them and making sense is George’s long suit. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration is the latest government agency to feel the chill of line-item veto. The mark-out guys dealt particularly heavy handedly with Pieter Tans. With the Earth System Research Laboratory at NOAA for over twenty years, Pieter’s scientific peers are feeling the neocon pinch.

As in don’t disclose the numbers, as in don’t even get close to the words global warming, warming climate and climate change. You’d rather expect that something as specifically named as the Earth System Research Laboratory would have to at least touch on what's going on with the Earth's systems. Particularly in times when other scientific organizations (with the exception of George Will) are documenting disappearing ice-flows. 

In a recent study appearing in the journal Science, University of Alaska researchers, using a satellite laser system found that the rate of melting amounts to 24 cubic miles annually. Can you conceive of a block of ice a mile square and a mile deep? Can you form any relevant mental picture of 24 times that much? Disappearing? Polar bears catching the last ice-flow out of town?

Now then, if that proves to be correct or incorrect, it ought to have a considerable place in the public dialog. Either way, it’s not small news. Either way, it’s unconscionable that we who pay for the funding of NOAA, as well as its Earth Systems Research division, are blacked out of the agency’s scientific conclusions.

By our own government? C'mon, guys, the truth will set you free, whatever that truth is.

On their web site, the NOAA claims to be ‘taking the pulse of the planet,’ but apparently not its temperature. Vice Admiral Conrad Lautenbacher (retired), is serving as the undersecretary of commerce for oceans and atmosphere, overseeing the day-to-day functions of NOAA, as well as laying out its strategic and operational future. Under his wing (and it’s a big wing) shelters the

• National Environmental Satellite
• Data and Information Services
• National Marine Fisheries Service
• National Ocean Service
• National Weather Service
• Oceanic and Atmospheric Research
• Marine and Aviation Operations
• and the NOAA Corps

The Secretary of Commerce, for whom Lautenbacher serves as undersecretary, is Carlos Gutierrez and he’s the former chairman of the board and CEO of Kellogg Company, the corn-flake folks. In nominating Gutierrez, President Bush said,

“He understands the world of business, from the first rung on the ladder to the very top. He knows exactly what it takes to help American businesses grow and to create jobs.”

I’ll just bet he does. And what it takes is not to let subordinates of subordinates run around letting the general public in on the fact (George Will withstanding) that we’re melting like popsicles. Bad for business. Bad, bad, bad.

I’m not saying that Carlos has the word out to Conrad. How would I know? But GB never said of Lautenbacher that he knew business inside out. Science maybe, but not business and this is a business administration.

Quoting an April 6th Juliet Eilperin article in WaPo,

“Administration officials said they are following long-standing policies that were not enforced in the past. Kent Laborde, a NOAA public affairs officer who flew to Boulder last month to monitor an interview Tans did with a film crew from the BBC, said he was helping facilitate meetings between scientists and journalists.

Facilitate. Make easier. It’s easier with the line-item veto, fewer words to worry about and everyone can break for lunch on time. But it's still a long way to fly, Kent.

"We've always had the policy, it just hasn't been enforced," Laborde said. "It's important that the leadership knows something is coming out in the media, because it has a huge impact. The leadership needs to know the tenor or the tone of what we expect to be printed or broadcast.

Leadership? Certainly not Lautenbacher. Not George Will, tell me it isn’t so. You talking about the cornflake guy, Kent?

According to Eilperin’s piece, several times agency officials have tried to alter what these scientists tell the media. When Tans was helping to organize the Seventh International Carbon Dioxide Conference near Boulder last fall, his lab director told him participants could not use the term "climate change" in conference paper's titles and abstracts.

Anyway, during a week of ironing things all those things out, another half a cubic mile of ice disappeared into someone’s martini.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

A Possible 'Third Way' To Use Wild Lands

According to a Juliet Eilperin article in the Washington Post, a recent U.S. Forest Service study predicted that more than 44 million acres of private forest, an area twice the size of Maine, will be sold over the next 25 years.

She goes on to report that the consulting firm U.S. Forest Capital estimates that half of all U.S. timberland has changed hands in the past decade. The Bush administration is in there swinging from the heels as well, thirsting to sell off forest land by auctioning more than 300,000 acres of our National Forest to fund a rural school program.

It’s been said that suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem.

The Bush sell off certainly follows similar logic in getting rid of a national asset to fund a short-term shortfall, in schools of all things. One wonders what would be next? Advertising banners on the Washington Monument to fund No Child Left Behind?

But what’s happening to private timber sales is not only interesting, it opens up a kind of ‘third way’ to think about the development of recreational space.

There’s always been tension between those who are terrified to see any development at all in public lands, for fear of never-ending demands and decline. The other side of that issue finds it an entirely rational argument that deep wilderness, where no man sets his foot, is useless to society. Certainly it’s a truth to both constituencies that wild lands are an unduplicatable resource, because no one’s making them anymore.

Now comes the timber industry and, finding that tree farming in high-growth climates beats the costs of cutting in remote and slow-growth locations, they’re looking at the sale value of their holdings against harvest value. Wall Street pushes this reallocation of assets. Financial markets inexorably look to ‘highest and best use’ of assets, no matter if the publicly traded company deals in gumballs or lumber. Since timber companies are stock driven and profit oriented, they’re slowly cashing in those assets.

Initially, conservation groups attempted to hold these acreages together, but the price is too high, the lands too large and their resources too small.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Not to say it’s all a slide to money-interests.  Felicity Barringer reports in the NYTimes that International Paper announced it would receive $300 million in a deal arranged by the Nature Conservancy and the Conservation Fund for 217,000 acres in 10 states around the Southeast. The company also said it had sold 69,000 acres of forestland in Wisconsin for $83 million to the Nature Conservancy.

By far the largest deal involves 400,000 acres of land near Moosehead Lake in central Maine. The quick succession of sales provide golden opportunities for conservation organizations, but they don't have the gold. Conservation money is dwarfed by the amounts offered by developers of residential communities, golf courses and hunting clubs.

Whether that’s good or bad news depends on who looks over their shoulder.

We desperately need hunting and fishing opportunities, as well as attractive land for second-home communities. The high-tech of the city increasingly demands high-touch wild-places within reasonable driving distances to alleviate the intensity of the work place. And we are increasingly a high-tech society.

Quoting Chris Kelly, who heads the California office for Conservation Fund,

"We need to move away from this black-or-white idea that either it's preserved or destroyed, it's a national park or not enough. If you're trying to protect a landscape, if you're trying to protect 300,000 acres, it's impractical" to preserve the entire area as pristine wilderness.”

Creative solutions are not beyond the reach of combined interested parties. Eilperin’s article continues,

Jeff McEvoy owns Weatherby's Lodge in Grand Lake Stream, a town on the edge of Maine's North Woods. When Typhoon LLC, a timber investment company, wanted to sell off 339,000 acres in the region, the New England Forestry Foundation raised $30 million along with locals, enough to buy the development rights and create a 27,000-acre working forest that is logged but supports wildlife.

"People come here for the pristine wilderness experience," said McEvoy, who runs hunting and fishing trips out of a lodge that has thrived for 130 years.

Perhaps a creative combination of interests will keep Weatherbys going another 130. In any case, it’s no longer good enough or even equitable to keep fencing off wild lands to all but backpackers.

With conservation groups riding shotgun on planned developments, it may be that we come up with a truly creative third way that takes pressure off National Wilderness at the same time it allows a closer-in semi-wilderness experience.

How these lands are developed is far more important than if they are developed.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

A Whale Of a Controversy Over Sonar

A disclaimer is in order. Let it be stipulated that I am in no way an authority on the United States Navy, the science behind sonar technology or the navigational systems of sea mammals such as whales.

But hey, that's never prevented me from espousing a point of view and now seems an inappropriate time to begin all that time-consuming nonsense of learning the facts. This is commentary.

The Navy is looking for a site for their sailors to practice sonar in a shallow-water environment, which sounds logical enough and they’ve selected the waters off North Carolina, a dicey choice. That particular area is habitat for two groups of whales, both the Beaked and Right whale. Right whales are endangered already and beaked whales have proven to be particularly sensitive to sonar.

But I guess the training has to proceed, else how are we to protect ourselves against the thousands of North Korean and Chinese submarines that ply our coasts? Only the Navy or Secretary Rumsfeld would have the answer to that and it's not likely as a high priority while the rest of their tactical world is melting down.

Be that as it may, some 190+ words into this commentary, I have a proposed solution. Potentially, a pretty good one. Why is it not possible to carry off this entire training exercise by sonar simulator? We have flight simulators that reduce the need for expensive flight time in commercial aircraft. Why not apply the same logic and technology to the sensitive environment of sea mammals?

No one can deny (according to what I’ve read) that the Navy needs to conduct sonar training in shallow waters, where sound propagates differently than in the deep ocean. So, who am I to deny that? But I suspect that the ‘propagating differently’ that sonar does in that shallow water environment can be programmed into a computer.

I have a  friend, working for NASA, doing computer-generated Mars simulations, so when they go there, they’ll know what to expect. We don’t talk about it, because it doesn’t interest me much, it’s way beyond my technical understanding and I suppose he’s not supposed to gab about it. But if they can simulate Mars, it seems probable they can simulate the shallow water off South Carolina.

Give me a break. It's zaps, right? Send a zap, listen for a zap, make sure you can tell this zap from that. Learn to tell the Russian zap from the Korean or Chinese zap, make sure our Navy is able to close the zap-gap.

Simulators have the further agreeable component of being able to produce an entire Disney-World of possibilities. You want a simulated collision, malfunction, near-miss, ghost reading, blackout, thunderstorm, power failure or broken link in the chain-of-command, you can have it and never so much as come to the attention of a nearby whale. If Donald Rumsfeld has the hiccups after a big lunch, computers can simulate it and sailors can learn to recognize it. Understandable language from Rummy might be beyond them, but hiccups they can do.

You can accomplish this on a ship at sea, on land in a closed-in cubicle or in all probability within the confines of the Starbucks of your choice.

Unless I miss my guess, sonar isn’t something you lean over the rail and try to hear coming back at you over the rush of a bow-wave. In all likelihood, it’s done at a desk within the bowels of a submarine or perhaps even an aircraft-carrier, by a serious looking young sailor under the pressure of a commanding officer breathing down his neck. A slam-dunk for Justin Chatwin in the upcoming film, “Sonar.”

Supposedly, the three sites favored by the Navy were chosen for practical reasons: they were close to home ports, air stations and federal shore facilities; had appropriate water depths; and had a satisfactory climate. That last is code for the Fleet Admiral being able to play golf nearby at his favorite club. Okay, I admit that’s a cheap-shot. But certainly whales were not on the to-do list.

What’s the problem with simulators, Admiral? Not salty enough?
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

If You Hold a Shell to Your Ear, You Can Hear Ted Kennedy

It's all about views (and whose make news). The latest not-in-my-backyard brouhaha has been stewing longer than a Cape-Cod clambake and Teddy has found someone else to do the heavy lifting.

Rep. Don Young, a Cap’n Ahab look-alike from the seacoastering state of Alaska sneaked an amendment into the $8.7 billion Coast Guard bill on Teddy's behalf. Don, when not otherwise occupied in Abramoff-denial, is the chairman of the House Transportation Committee.

According to the Woods Hole Oceanographic Research Institution web site,

Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard are national tourist havens. Many summer homes have outstanding views of the nearby sounds, where the sailing is superb, the stripers and blues run thick, and fishing for lobster, scallops, and squid has been a popular livelihood for ages. If the wind farm is built on Nantucket Shoals, these views, and quite possibly the established pattern of ocean activities, could be altered permanently. Consequently, many Cape Codders and Islanders who otherwise support the idea of renewable energy—just not on Horseshoe Shoals—have become opponents to the wind farmers.

The lineup of those opposed to wind-farming off the romantic coasts of Cape Cod is hotter than the White-Sox infield and growing. That would smack of consensus politics and the way things ought to be done, if it weren’t for the fact that all these concerned legislative heavies own Cape property

• Senator John Warner
• Senator Lamar Alexander
• Rep. William Delahunt (representing the Cape in the House)
• And, of course, Teddy, most senatorial of all

John Kerry, who also owns property on the Cape is mute as well as moot, ‘cause this isn’t a smart fight for him to get into. One can only wonder what the quid-pro-quo with Don Young is for this neat hand-off in the backfield.

Young’s amendment neatly bans turbines within 1.5 miles of shipping and ferry lanes on the preposterous notion that those big (and some think beautiful) blades screw up shipboard radar. He ‘singled out’ the Cape as ‘particularly unsafe’ in case anyone should miss his sledge-hammered point.

Don says the ban is based on research in Britain concerning the radar issue, although wind farms are being developed off the coast of Britain, so I guess Tony Blair must have lost the data in the sofa.

Ever wonder why vague references to radar can kill environmentally friendly wind farms and yet the Navy keeps on killing whales with their sonar without a problem? Whales don’t have a constituency in Congress with names like Kennedy, Warner and Alexander.

Again, according to Woods Hole,

Utilities in Europe have been generating power from ocean wind for more than a decade, ever since the Vindeby facility off Denmark became operational in 1991. Wind farms are being developed off the coasts of Denmark, Great Britain, Sweden, and the Netherlands, creating 246 MW of power generating capacity—including 160 MW at the Horns Rev wind farm that came online in 2003 along Denmark’s west coast. An additional 5,000 MW of capacity is planned for northern Europe.

Public opposition to wind farms on the Cape claims to be based mainly on worries that they will spoil seascapes and have detrimental effects on birds, marine animals, and their habitats. Other groups have expressed concerns about the potential impact on sailors and important commercial fisheries.

What a laugh. It’s all about fat-cats and their right to be fat, unfettered, arrogant as hell, with tailored environmental concerns that devastate Wyoming and leave the Cape alone.

The greatest threat to lobster-fishermen along the Maine Coast at the moment isn't pollution or disappearing fish-stock, but the influx of Condo-bunnies from Boston and New York. They don’t like to be awakened by those nasty old smelly lobster-boat diesels cranking up at dawn. The quaint little seaports smell fishy as well, an embarrassing problem when entertaining.

Quaint is always someone else’s idea of working America.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Bureau of Land Damagment

Westerners know the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) far better than our brothers on the Atlantic coast. 

Their web site says they are ‘an agency within the U.S. Department of the Interior, (that) administers 261 million surface acres of America's public lands, located primarily in 12 Western States. The BLM sustains the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for  the use and enjoyment of present and future generations.’

Huge cattle, farming, mining and drilling operations operate on BLM leases from the federal government.

But there’s an ebb and a flow to management integrity in this imperfect world.

What constitutes even-handed and economic handling of those public resources is defined differently by Dick Cheney (resident of Wyoming) and Dave Freudenthal (its Governor).

Wyoming is ebbing at the moment, big-time.

Talk to different people, hear different things. An anonymous senior official at the BLM claims it’s become cultural practice to spend money that’s assigned one purpose for quite another, a sort of prioritizing by the whim of whoever’s in charge.

What would we do without these anonymous tellers of tales and (better question yet) how do we make or change national policy on the basis of some guy who’s afraid for his job? Maybe he’s a crackpot, maybe a true servant of the people. But name withheld by request has become the normal request.

What we have going for us, we who have no intimate access, is a feel for the purity of argument. Some things sound logical, some things don’t.

The Energy Policy Act of 2005, an act orchestrated in secret within the darkest recesses of Dick Cheney’s office and modeled on industry wish-lists, updated something called the BLM and Forest Service Gold Book. Gold Book. It trills off the tongue, sends shivers of delight down the backs of  oil and gas industry executives. According to the Energy Policy Act

This new Gold Book introduces improved practices for expediting the processing of Applications for Permits to Drill (APDs) and environmental Best Management Practices (BMPs) to reduce the environmental effect of energy exploration and production. The revised Gold Book includes updated drawings, photographs, tables, and references to updated policy, Orders, and regulations.

Call me a party-pooper, but improved practices for expediting applications to drill, doesn’t sound much like sustaining the health, diversity, and productivity of the public lands for  the use and enjoyment of present and future generations. It sounds more like a resources grab by guys close to Cheney, maybe even guys privy to the deals from his darkest recesses.

Bob Bennett, the go-to guy at the Wyoming BLM says (with a straight-face and no apparent irony) "If a wildlife biologist is working on an application for a permit to drill, that doesn't mean he is not doing wildlife work. The wildlife job is a broad job, and it does involve energy."

Sounds like wildlife-work to me, Bob. 13,000 permits in two years keeps keeps those biologists pushing the paper, no matter it’s twice the rate that industry has the resources to drill.

There’s no way this administration’s zeal for giving away the West can continue under a newly elected President, no matter the party. So, it’s push permits until the music stops.

Governor Freudenthal, along with some oil industry executives, is shaken as scientific studies show steady, consistent and steep declines in wildlife around gas fields. Obviously, environmentalists and career-biologists agree, but it’s stunning to hear murmurs from the energy execs. Stunning and worrisome.

For his part, Bennett would like to "take it slow and easy." But he claims the bureau is under "a lot of national pressure, from industry and from Congress. The demand for gas is a real issue to people."

It just makes you wonder, which people?
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Intellect Elects Not to Connect All the Dots

One of the most amazing things to me about the human animal is its ability to compartmentalize. We are different from the other animals of the earth, because of our intellect.

It’s a fact! Our big brain, our ability to intellectualize in place of mere instinct, is what provides us with pencils in ten-packs for 29 cents, Audi sedans for $29 thousand, nuclear submarines for $29 million and a month of world trade at (negative, sorry ‘bout that) $29 billion. Admittedly, of all the above choices, the #2 common school pencil is the best deal, but that’s another story.

So, here we are, at the end of 10,000 or so years of pretty decent progress, makin' our way, able to split atoms and able to play poker for money on our computers, but somehow unable to deal with reality. Okay, I grant you that reality has always been a little hard for the brain-cells.

Reality-wise, an appliance, long out of warrantee, still comes as a shock when it stops making coffee and leaks all over the kitchen counter. A marriage, long sliding inexorably downhill, seems okay as long as the house is painted, the lawn mowed and the TV works. Flooded kitchen counters and a wife’s demand of divorce, each of them incomprehensible, are always a shock to the distracted, but big-brained husband.

Thus it is that (shhhh, I have to whisper this) global warming has come like a thief in the night and stolen the silverware. It's gone, the metaphoric silverware. Warming, on the other hand, is still with us. Your exploding heating-bill is not an accurate measure of what's happening on the other side of the window, it's merely an economic happenstance. How did this happen? The Prez promised it wouldn't.

Greenland's glaciers are melting into the sea twice as fast as previously believed and it was previously believed that they were going pretty fast. Damned Vikings again, will their mischief never stop? Buried under all that perma-frost and glacial ice, we may finally find out the answer to the pressing question of whether Greenland is really green, so it’s not all bad news.

What is bad news is that we’re probably long past any ability to stop a significant rise (probably 20 feet) in ocean levels world-wide by the end of the century. Whew, that’s a relief. Plenty of time to sell the condo in Sea Island and move to Vail. Better get out of Naples and Palm Beach before the realtors catch on. Florida’s coastline will shrink like a $2 sweater and Key West be only a memory of Hemingway.

No longer a question of if, but only how much. It’s not George Bush’s fault, although he’s not been much help. The Polar Ice Cap went into irreversible decline well before Jack Abramoff. If George and the Congress continue to be negligent, it’s only by recommending $70 billion to rehab a Gulf Coast that will not exist in the relatively near future.

In the useless statistics department, scientists said in 1996, the amount of water produced by melting ice in Greenland was about 90 times the amount consumed by Los Angeles in a year. Well, that certainly clears it up for me. Last year, the melted ice amounted to 225 times the volume of water that city uses annually. Don’t panic. A pipeline to LA is the answer. Except LA will be as gone as New Orleans by 2100. Like I said, it’s not all bad news.

It’s not only Polar. One glacier that provided Bolivia with its only ski slope five years ago has splintered into three and cannot be used for skiing. That’s the last straw! Selling the Sea Island condo is bad enough, but not being able to ski in Bolivia is intolerable.

Oceans rising is only part of it. The equatorial band around the earth will become increasingly uninhabitable to man, including great swaths of the Middle East and the African continent. The haves will have less and the have-nots will have nothing. Immigration to a smaller and smaller list of inhabitable countries will slow, then stop, then be enforced at the business end of a machine-gun.

But it’s not too late is no longer an option. That time passed us by while we were wondering who would be this years American Idol and whether a second-mortgage would be necessary to send the kid to college.

Sorry ‘bout that. Blame our compartmented intellect, the finest Darwinian achievement the world (as yet) has ever known.

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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Small Again, It’s Small, You Dummies

I thought it was Lee Iacocca calling from the west coast, but the voice was a little hollow, so it might have been Jacob Marley, rattling his chains, as the ghost of Christmas past.

“Hey you, dummy, waddya doin’ pushin’ those gas-hog SUVs? Their time is gone, it’s small again. Small, get it?”

Lee is in his eighties and he’s seen it all. Mustang through muscle at Ford and then a hop to Chrysler, where he saved their bacon with a matchbox called the K-Car. It even sounds like a box top.

Detroit had its lesson during the energy crisis of the seventies, when they left the back door unlocked by pumping out motorboats disguised as family cars and the Japanese sneaked into the house. Lee seemed to be the only guy in Mo-Town who saw it for what it was and while he publicly railed against the ‘rice-burner’ competition, he knew a gunslinger when he met one.

Iacocca is long since retired, but it’s due in large part to his legacy that Daimler-Chrysler is the only half-American firm on the street that’s making money. All-American Ford and GM fiddled with small cars for a while, but their heart was never in it. They kept repeating like a mantra, the myth that only big cars could carry big profit. Too egocentric to see what was happening before their very eyes, they teased the home market and their balance-sheets with persistently upsized cars.

Market share kept shrinking. Ford almost (and probably should have) lost Mercury and GM threw away Oldsmobile. Both companies essentially became truck builders, carrying their losses with SUVs and pickups, all of them built on truck chassis. Meanwhile Honda, Toyota and the new guys on the block, the Koreans, sucked all the oxygen out of the passenger-car market with distinctive, well-made, highly profitable small cars.

It was very nearly a replay of the seventies. Unfortunately, this time Detroit was a time-worn old boxer with no punch left, slow on its feet, no reflexes and up against the ropes with cuts over both eyes. The towel has not yet been thrown in. GM made a little money this year, there’s still a little time left. A few Wall Street backers would love to see a comeback. But old boxers get lazy and hate to train. Roadwork is no fun and they’re no longer as hungry as the young guys coming up.

Even the young guys coming up are no longer young. Honda’s been sold here since 1959 and manufactured in the U.S. since 1980, hardly what you’d call the new guy on the block. Toyota pretty much matches that history, so it’s a myth that you can’t manufacture cars in America if you’re not one of the big three. It might not have worked out all that well for Kaiser, Tucker or DeLorean, but the Japanese have done just fine.

It’s probably too late for the big American companies this time around, no matter Lee’s warning call from the west coast. The things that could have been fixed in the ‘70’s weren’t because life in Bloomfield Hills was just too easy and hey, it was only a knockdown, a lucky punch. The match wasn’t over. Mo-Town had been the champ too long. Daimler-Benz may have invented the car, but Henry invented the method and Madison Avenue invented the market. It was our game.

If there’s hope for American manufacturers, it may be found at Chrysler’s Dundee engine plant. A Chrysler alliance that includes Mitsubishi and Hyundai, the plant will produce 840,000 engines a year with only 250 hourly workers. Chrysler currently employs 750 workers to build 350,000 engines at its Mack Avenue plant in Detroit, down from 2,500 workers at their old engine plant in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

That’s at least the right direction, from one worker per 140 engines to one worker per 3,360 engines.

If Chrysler (or Ford or GM) can make similar progress in their design, engineering and non-engine production, the world will be their oyster. But there’s more to thinking small than small cars. Small has to be across-the-board and that’ll take some heavy-duty training for an aging boxer.

Back to the future.
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Nuclear Proliferation Has Its Place

Once we’ve all agreed that keeping nuclear weapons in the box they came in is impossible, other options become agreeable, or at least open to discussion. Pakistan having the bomb rather abruptly cut off all serious talk about containment. And that’s probably a good thing. 

So, having cashed-in at least some of our cold-war prejudices, we can get to work on demystifying the old nuclear power bugaboos, one of which has always been what to do about the reprocessing of spent fuel rods. Our Prez has an idea on that. He wants the U.S. to get in the reprocessing business, effectively becoming the world's go-to (and only) source.

Might not be a bad idea. Whether or not the world will accept the parenthetical portion of that intention, we can only wait to see. One can imagine problems.

This idea has shaken some members of Congress who consider it ‘an expensive venture that relies on unproven concepts’ that could increase the danger of proliferation. Yeah well, the spread of nuke technology is a given. It’s like trying to keep the secret of steelmaking to ourselves during the industrial revolution. What used to be complicated is now pretty straightforward and making bombs is more a question of money and access to raw materials than it is know-how.

The world certainly doesn’t need more killing-power, but it desperately needs more non-fossil-fuel energy.

Nuclear power is essentially steam-power to drive turbines. It’s been called a hell of a dangerous way to boil water, but it’s become less so with each generation of nuclear plants. Three Mile Island and Chernobyl are no longer even close to the norm technologically and, if we can get over the jumpiness about fuel reprocessing producing weapons grade plutonium, everyone can get down to fine-tuning reactor design.

The people who think this is a good idea, talk about a process that doesn’t separate plutonium, but whips up a mixed fuel too hot for terrorists to handle. Such a ‘hot mix’ can be used in special reactors that exist in France but not as yet in the United States.

Talk about French fries.

Bush is trying to get on the front-end of the global warming flak he’s been taking, saying "We ought to have more nuclear power in the United States of America. It's clean, it's renewable, it's safer than it ever was in the past." All of which is true and all of would lean us away from our vulnerability to each and every oil crisis.

A strong argument can be made for turning the world’s ink-blot reaction to the word ‘nuclear’ from bombs to energy. A remarkably effective way to do that would be to fund major research into reactor technology, share that research with other nations and lease reactors to economically emerging nations, where the dirtiest energy policies undermine new standards.

The key to that, at least in the short-term, is to control the disposition of nuclear fuel, from inception though the numerous re-processings to final disposal. The Bush plan (which he has not yet signed-off on and which is being shopped around to various allies) would solve that by making the United States the world’s source of re-processed fuel. That will make for some very interesting international shipping problems, as well as land-based transport. But who knows, maybe we'll do it all on a remote Pacific atoll and perhaps the fuel itself will become far less difficult to handle.

Maybe that's a fair share of supposition, but this 21st century will be technologically advanced beyond all commonly held understanding.

What a huge and sudden leap it would be, from the controversy over spent nuclear fuel disposal in the western states, to recycling for profit. Which doesn’t mean there is no controversy. There’s bound to be a huge national debate, as there should be. Everyone comes equally out of denial; the administration that there’s no global warming issue and the public that nuclear in any form is a no-no.

A few decades late, but better late than . . . whatever.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Taking a Bead on Bambi

First Walt Disney and after that the outpouring of Saturday morning cartoon fare for children has raised us a generation of non-hunters. The Bambi-Generation, well-meaning but uninformed, they see each backyard creature in humanized terms. Lovable little animals with voices cringe from the bad old NRA Elmer Fudds that rational sportsmen have become.

And nature, being an opportunity-based force, rewarded us with city parks and golf courses plagued with Canada geese, suburban gardens ravaged by Bambi and a resurgence of predator types from foxes to coyotes to the occasional edge-of-town-lurking mountain lion.

Those who used to suit up on weekends to disrupt this or that form of hunting activity, now lie abed at night in their suburban homes and, if they listen closely, hear the muffled munching of Brer Rabbit in whatever serves for the backyard briar patch. It's interesting and instructive to watch the Bambi-Generation come up against the reality of living in a relatively predator-free suburban environment. Animal rights are giving (ever so slight) way to the every day experience of an urban life that strives to coexist with a perpetually encroaching wildlife.

The Chicago area, where I hail from originally, got a taste of what was to come nationally, some twenty or thirty years ago. Chicago and, specifically, Cook County prides itself on the extensive Cook County Forest Preserve District it pulled around its broad shoulders some seventy years ago. Virtually a wilderness shawl, another of Chicago’s unique preservations of green space. The district encompasses some 67,000 acres, 77 times the size of New York's Central Park.

That luxury used to hold within its boundaries an almost unlimited natural wonderland, abundant in the spring with trillium, jack-in-the-pulpit, primrose and wild phlox. Black and raspberry shrubs, cranberry, dogwood, redbud and countless other native plants are mostly absent today from Cook County's’s forest preserves.

A ‘browse line’ some four feet off the ground evidences such all inclusive destruction of wild underplantings that it looks as if man himself had been clearing and cutting. It looks far too neat for nature. Thousands of varieties of native species are at risk to overpopulating deer, who no longer have natural enemies to pare their numbers.

Hunting seasons in and around urban areas are sneaking back into the allowed rhetoric, although we’ve largely lost our hunting dads to the Bambi-Generation. Possibly we'll import hunting instructors from the Austrian Tyrol as we now hire Swiss ski-instructors. These loden-clad Europeans might work through the language barrier to infiltrate the hunting barrier amongst our young and inexperienced.

Thus might the frontier heritage long lost to our culture and our native woodlands be restored simultaneously.

Almost 900 deer are killed annually within Cook County. It’s not a minor accident when a 260 pound deer comes through your windshield, particularly if it ends up in your or your child’s lap. Approximately 150 people a year lose their lives to deer collisions nationwide and nearly $1 billion is spent repairing bashed-up cars. Hunting the population down to manageable size has been the way of the world sine there have been deer and geese.

Just because we have shed our hunting instinct to the humanization of Disney's Enchanted Forest doesn’t mean that the hunting solution is no longer valid.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Don’t Talk About Leaders, I want to Hear About Lenders

President George has reawakened to the reality of New Orleans once again. It must have to do with his going to the ranch for Christmas. Memories there on the high chaparral of past ranching holidays. One in particular when there was a storm, a few trees down and a major coastal city all but disappeared.

So, before taking off to console himself over recent party desertions and back-stabbings, he doubled the money down for NO relief. Like doubling down on two dealt Jacks at Vegas, hoping to get lucky.

He announced the added dough as a ‘leadership’ thing. Our Prez is high on leadership, if sometimes a little slow on reasoning. Anyway, Donald Powell, the latest of the confused guys running the New Orleans relief efforts, agreed to step in and increase the levee spending from $1.6 billion to three thousand, one hundred millions of dollars.

That’s a lot of thousands of millions for a city whose viability as a long-term survivor is still in doubt.

The idea is to get something going down there, anything to get the taste out of the President’s mouth from that giveaway speech he made in front of Saint Louis Cathedral. Man, you tell people you care about them, promise you’ll help and the first thing you know they start showing up on the front steps of the White House, wondering when it’s going to start happening.

But you have to have levees, even the President can understand that. The squeeze is on to see if the lumbering behemoth in charge of levees, the United States Army Corps of Engineers, can get anything stuck on that will hold by the start of next year’s hurricane season.

A further problem lies in our federal sticking-our-head-in-the-sand over the global warming issue, because that’s of primo concern in the case of New Orleans. No one’s allowed to talk about it for fear of waking the ostrich. Hurricanes are generated by warm water in the southern oceans. Keep this very much under your hat, because it’s classified information, but the southern oceans are getting warmer.

George can’t be told this because he gets testy, starts throwing things, swearing and ultimately stomping out of meetings. Various staff members, declining to give their names, say it’s just not worth it, adding with a shrug, “how much can the oceans really heat up in the remaining three years of this administration?”

Good point. But temper tantrums aside, someone has to lend the money for whatever is done in the surviving shell of what was once an historic city. Pompeii didn’t get rebuilt, not for lack of available contractors in Rome and Naples, but because the Medici brothers in Florence wouldn’t guarantee the loans.

And the fact that no one can bear to tell George is that, although the number of hurricanes coming ashore on the Gulf Coast isn’t going to increase (whew), the severity is expected to increase (drat) and keep on increasing to category 5, 6 and 7 intensity (damn). So, two things better happen really, really quickly:

1. The Corps of Engineers better figure out how to do twenty-five years of levee rebuilding in ten months, and
2. Someone outside ordinary run-of-the-mill commercial investment sources better be found to guarantee the Crescent City’s development loans.

If the feds (you and me) decide to cover this base, there will be a huge public outcry and I will be at the head of the pack, outcrying with the best of them. Which brings up another strange and wonderful coincidence. Donald E. Powell, the guy overseeing the spending of the Katrina money is Bush’s head of the FDIC. The FDIC insures bank accounts in case of a financial disaster or an individual bank failure.

Could the administration, in their wildest dreams, be thinking of allowing the FDIC to underwrite Katrina rebuilding loans?

Nah! Couldn’t happen!
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

A Snake River-Colunbia River Fish Story

There are certainly enough claims for ‘equity’ these days and salmon may not strike you as having a voice in the discord that’s out there, but Congress thought they did. Admittedly, they thought that some twenty-five years ago, a full ten years before Larry Craig became the Senator from Idaho and set out to erase equity as a salmon standard.

In 1980, Congress passed a law ordering that salmon in the Columbia hydro-system receive "equitable treatment," along with electricity generation, irrigation and barge transport. I don’t know how exactly you measure being equitable to a salmon, but those were days when Congress worried about such things. For that altruistic concern, the created the Bonneville Power Administration (BPA), the federal agency that sells power from federal dams.

So far, so good.

That twenty-five year ago legislation created the Fish Passage Center, a tiny fish-science organization with just 12 employees that counts salmon in the river ecosystem, to see how they’re doing. The power companies hate those well meaning fish-counters because from time to time they’re ordered to send enough water over the top of the dams to keep salmon alive and healthy. Water over the top doesn’t make any money.

Something like four out of five homes in the Pacific Northwest are lighted by hydroelectric power, so the Snake and Columbia river system is a big deal, an absolutely right direction to have gone for power generation and a vital national asset. But the rivers were dammed by agreement and with requirements and salmon were part of that. An agreed part. A part that can be lived with at relatively small cost.

Enter, Larry Craig, Senator from Idaho, where he is the darling of the hydroelectric power industry. The last time Larry had to defend his seat in 2002, he piled up more money from electric utilities than from any other industry. I don’t know if Larry fishes, but I do know he was named "legislator of the year" by the National Hydropower Association. Legislator of the Year. That would be a hell of a fine tribute, if it came from anyone other than a guy’s deepest-pocketed contributor.

The National Hydropower Association’s “Legislator We Most Own in Washington Award” doesn’t have quite that nail-it-on-the-wall right there next to the picture of me and the president aspect about it. Particularly as it undoes Congress’ 1980 intent. Craig’s contribution to the undoing was but a single sentence hidden in fine print of the energy and water appropriations bill. "The Bonneville Power Administration may make no new obligations in support of the Fish Passage Center." Very concise, well edited and not too wordy, Senator.

Fish and game agencies in Oregon, Washington and Idaho, Indian tribes with fishing rights on the river and the governors of Oregon and Washington have all said that eliminating the Fish Passage Center is a bad idea that would reduce the quality of information on endangered salmon. But it’s a dead issue, because if you don’t count the fish, no one needs to require water for the fish that aren't counted and Larry has just made sure no one counts.

Okay, so what? The ‘so what’ is the method by which this occurred. Craig didn’t craft that sentence (admittedly, I speculate), the power industry did. It was cunningly tucked in to the legislation where no one would see it. Few Senators actually read these bills, their staffs are charged with that. An overworked staff, a single sentence.

Bingo! Pay-back time for a fish story.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

A Fisherman’s (possible) Dream Fish

What fishermen like is catching fish, and if that fish strikes artificial baits aggressively, grows to be a whopper in a relatively short time and is excellent to eat, then what’s not to like?  Tasty white meat, a fighter that grows to three feet in length, this freshwater game fish has everything required to get fathers and sons up early and in the boat together. Make that mothers and daughters as well, as more and more fishermen are women.

But we need a name for it that’s more attractive for the frying pan than snakehead.  Ugh.  Can I please have another helping of snakehead? doesn’t do much for dinner table conversation.  Some more snakehead, darling?  Won’t work.

But it strikes me that before we stumble all over ourselves poisoning ponds and constructing elaborate electric fences across rivers, we ought to take a look at this Asian fish that’s been found in some East Coast ponds as well as the Potomac River tributaries.  Steve Minkkinen, snakehead expert at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says “There’s a lot we don’t know about this fish.”

Well said, Steve.  So, let’s not denigrate it before we understand it. While they may not be able to control spread of the species in the Potomac, Fish and Wildlife is eager to see that it doesn’t spread elsewhere.  My question is why?  Because we might deprive a few stodgy old walleye fishermen of their fast-action bobber-fishing?  (Don't write me, I've fished for walleye myself, even ate one once)

Economies of several states are closely tied to freshwater fishing and in at least one with which I am familiar, fishing success is too unreliable to register these days as a core sport.  Northern Wisconsin’s walleye fishing continues to decline and musky fishing is so illusive as to be pretty much a mirage.  Professional guides these days are mostly school teachers on summer break because a living can no longer be made from guiding fishermen. Compare that with the days of the 'Fisherman's Special' out of Chicago that the C&NW ran into Woodruff, Wisconsin every Friday night. A sleeper, the Special was unhitched and sat on its side track until guides picked up their fishermen on Saturday morning.

Decades ago, Wisconsin took it’s most prolific and easiest-to-catch game fish and denigrated it by calling the species ‘snakes’ and thus the northern pike fell from favor.  Hindsight may see that as a mistake, now that stunningly beautiful Wisconsin lakes have run out of fishermen and been taken over by jet-skis.

According to U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reports, in 1996 an estimated 35.2 million people 16 years of age and older spent over $38 billion in goods and services related to fishing in the United States.  That's a lot of dough. If fishing was a company, that dollar amount would rank it in the top 20 of the Fortune 500 list for 1996. 1996 was after the Fisherman's Special and before Google, so who knows what the ranking would be today.

The $38 billion includes expenditures at sporting goods stores, specialty fishing stores, hotels and motels, fishing lodges and camps, guide services, retail food stores and restaurants.  This money rippled through the national, state and local economies, adding up to a total economic impact of $108 billion. Sport fishing sustains 1.2 million jobs, worth $28 billion in total earnings.  It also generates over $5.5 billion in taxes.  Expenditures from fishing are, or at least were, central to the economic health and growth of many small communities.

Fish and Wildlife might well do two things before they trash the reputation of (possibly) a savior-fish.  Number one, find a handsome and catchy (no pun intended) name for it.  Second, initiate some experimental programs in relatively large land-locked lakes in both the north and south.  Let’s find the potential of this Asian accidental import, see how it adapts and if lakes can sustain it alongside a stable population of panfish, trout, bass, walleye and other native varieties. So-called invasive species often stabilize and adapt to their environment without destroying it.

Thirty years ago the alewife overwhelmed Lake Michigan, driving down perch populations and virtually wrecking beaches with an annual die-off requiring trucks to haul them off.  The great equalizer of the alewife misery turned out to be the coho salmon, a fish we’d never heard of in Lake Michigan when I was a kid.  There’s a huge industry associated with coho fishing now and the lake and its fishermen are far the better for it.

But please, let’s find another name for the snakehead before inviting friends over for dinner.  Any ideas?
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

The Wet Spot in The Backyard

All right, so maybe it’s not in the backyard, but it’s a wet spot and in their mind it’s their wet spot, not the federal government’s.  The Supreme Court is set to shake all this out, in case you thought wet spots were trifling matters.

What we (and they) are talking about is the preservation of wetlands and who has or hasn’t the right to make them dry.  Most of us think that draining a swamp is a good idea, but the federal position is that wetlands are a part of the commonwealth ecosystem, something that belongs to us all and are protected by the Clean Water Act.

Which was probably a mistake and too broad an interpretation. 

What we needed and didn’t get was a wetlands protection statute.  But the Court often finds itself in this position, running up and down the sidelines, refereeing a mismatched game.  Wetlands and clean water are connected, but the structure the government has chosen to enforce its position relies on interstate commerce and waters that support recreation or shipping. 

To drain my swamp?  Are you kidding?  You gotta be kidding.

Once again the Feds are knocking on the court door to accomplish something worth while with laws that are not meant to do it.  Quite likely they will lose and the environmental people will scream and rage as environmental people are wont to do.  They should instead lobby the Congress for decent wetland legislation and stop misusing a minnow or frog to hold back the Darth Vaders of commerce. 

Saving old growth timber by enlisting the unwitting help of the Spotted Owl is wrong and, because it is wrong, people on both sides of a very worthwhile issue have come to blows.  The same kind of foolishness is shaping up with wetlands.  They need to be saved, but not by applying wrong law. Protecting a wetland threatened by a developer who wants to dry it up to build a supermarket is a good idea, but making the ludicrous claim that interstate commerce will be affected by his choice is just plain dumb.

Let’s face it, ownership of land is a problem.  On the one hand, our home is our castle and the sanctity of private property is basic to our freedoms.  But we’re such short-term owners, we're not indicidually very good stewards of long-term value to society.  We move on as quickly as profit or convenience allow.  Over a lifetime, I have owned some thirteen houses.  Owned them legally right down to the center of the earth and, within the limits of my mortgages, had the right to do pretty much as I wanted with them and the land upon which they stood. But a house is a house, it's not a wetland or an old-growth forest.

How did I come to own them? The obvious answer is I bought them, but the cosmic answer is pretty twisty.  Basically, American land was taken from those who had it before us, either by force or purchase.  It’s the ability of my government to hold off all comers that guarantees me title.  Title is a modern concept, a bargain, struck in an eyewink of human history.  It's an agreement, backed by the force of government. 

So private ownership and public good are in some ways, maybe many ways, at odds with each other.   

I can drain the swamp and move on, most likely at a profit, cut the timber and do the same.  Any fool with a chain saw can cut down a tree in ten minutes that took a hundred years to grow.  I have a short-term goal that may not (and usually does not) square with the long-term public good. 

But should I be stopped?

Yeah, I think so, but I also think we need to talk about that nationally and turn down the volume of the rhetoric a bit.  It is a certainty that cutting the last of our old-growth timber, paving over small-area wetlands, building on inhospitable barrier islands, pumping down the public water tables, diverting rivers to irrigation, allowing coal power generation and a host of other activities that are not friendly to our long-term health and happiness, all have various impacts on private rights.

The right to be left the hell alone  in comfort and health cannot help but infringe to some degree on the right to private profit. How we face that and what compromises are made in the process are really earth-shaking issues.  The Supreme Court will no doubt make various rulings on the constitutional issues raised.

That job is really a tough call for the Court and made a lot tougher when the law is bent to serve a worthwhile purpose in an underhanded way.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Flushing Our Gulf Toilet

An interesting point of view a couple days ago from Donna Yowell.  Donna is the executive director of something called the Mississippi Urban Forest Council.  I checked out their web site and they have a slick little brochure there, even though the print is a mite too small for me.  They talk about the benefits of membership, the importance of trees and a bunch of other undeniable benefits to preferring trees over parking lots. 

But Donna is on the wrong scent when she talks about what Katrina did to her trees.  Specifically, she’s talking about Mississippi’s Clower-Thornton Nature Trail, which she toured recently.  “Every tree is brown, every leaf blown off," she says and Hurricane Katrina “has turned it into a toxic waste site overnight.”

Well, I don’t want to split hairs, Donna, but blaming Katrina for turning your favorite hiking trail into a toxic wasteland is sort of like blaming your toilet for the human waste that it’s designed to get rid of.  Hurricanes are nasty creatures when it comes to the man-made structures they come in contact with.  But they are also cleansers of the land they fall upon, flushing away what doesn’t belong and renewing the natural environment. They've been doing that for a good long time, an original and way early example of 'intelligent design.' Before people.  Before people even thought about being people.

The toxic stew that pollutes New Orleans, that we are this minute pumping into Lake Pontchartrain so it’ll be around a while in case we need it later, has no more to do with hurricanes than Walt Disney has to do with reality. We’re currently paying a monstrous price for decades of neglect, generations of not taking seriously all those nasty problems from industrial farming to the various ‘holding ponds’ that no longer held for chemical plants and refineries. 

Katrina pulled the chain.  What flushed was our doing.

There’s a panic on right now to ‘do something’ because we are not standers-by when the big challenge comes our way.  That’s more than understandable,  Toxic New Orleans must be pumped somewhere and both Pontchartrain and the Gulf are equally miserable decisions. 

Well, maybe not equally. Pontchartrain is probably the best of bad choices because it can be monitored closely over the nest twenty years and perhaps be brought back.  If we care enough.  Lake Erie was written off as a chemical soup and came back to be a fishing paradise, so there’s hope for Pontchartrain.

The Gulf is another matter, its ‘dead zone’ having expanded every year for the past thirty or so, virtually extinguishing the Gulf coast fishery.  Essentially, the Gulf is an inland sea, a closed bucket, like the Mediterranean and the lessons are much the same.  Surrounding countries flushing into the communal cesspool have pretty much destroyed the fishery; the Med over millennia and the Gulf over a few centuries.

Congress plans to examine the question soon.

Well, that cheers me considerably.  Way back in July, the Congress listened to a bunch of the world’s best climate researchers and, get this, a bipartisan group of Senators said they saw the need to take quick action.  Quick action.  They all said it, Democrats standing side by side to Republicans and saying it, “Quick action.” 

But they also said they were ‘struggling’ to reach a consensus on what to do.  I can understand that it's a struggle whether to keep on cashing those big campaign-finance checks from Big Oil and Big Farming and Big Chemical or just give it up.  Maybe lease a cabin on Walden Pond and take turns waiting for the voice of Henry Thoreau to give them a tip . . . or a backbone . . . or some ethics . . . whatever.

So, don’t hold your breath.  My guess is that we’ll keep on keepin’ on until the next disaster, which . . . what was that sound? . . . was that hurricane Rita, sneakin’ up on Houston?

Damn! So soon?
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See Taking My Country Personally on my personal web site.

Hurricane Dissemble Makes Landfall at 9pm

Picking up on the second part of president Bush’s historic dissemble from Jackson Square on Thursday, he said “the federal government will undertake a close partnership with the states of Louisiana and Mississippi, the city of New Orleans and other Gulf coast cities, so they can rebuild in a sensible, well-planned way.”

Sorry, George, but sensible and well planned are not achieved by any of the objectives mentioned earlier in your speech.  Sensible and well planned have only (arguably) been achieved at the World Trade Center site in New York after four years and actual construction hasn’t even been started there. 

In four years you’ll be history.  So, don’t kid us about sensible and well-planned when you’re due-date for this bill of achievement is next year’s mid-term election.

Proposing ‘an urban forty acres and a mule,’ our president mandated Congress to create and pass an Urban Homesteading Act. 

Not applicable nor available to impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis, this proposed legislation reflects the president’s newly opened eyes on the Gulf coast.  An epiphany, reflecting the twelve days after Katrina and the visit of the three wise-men, Bush the unconcerned, Bush the contrite and Bush the budget-buster to the rescue.

“The work that has begun in the Gulf coast region will be one of the largest reconstruction efforts the world has ever seen. When that job is done, all Americans will have something to be very proud of.” Except, of course, those living in impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis. 

“Our cities must have clear and up-to-date plans for responding to natural disasters and disease outbreaks or a terrorist attack, for evacuating large numbers of people in an emergency, and for providing the food and water and security they would need.”

Correct me if I'm wrong.  I guess I had mistakenly believed the $10 billion or so we had spent on the Department of Homeland Security was supposed to have already taken care of those needs.  I was obviously in error.  That money was all allocated for the fuck-up leading to the actual getting-ready-for the preparation to possibly have in place such an organization at some future date.

“Congress is preparing an investigation, and I will work with members of both parties to make sure this effort is thorough.”  Laughable, George, on the face of it.  Take that one back to the speech-writers.   Not even the poor souls living in impoverished Detroit, the economically depressed Cabrini Green section of Chicago, the slum ghettos of Los Angeles, New York, Houston or St. Louis would be cheered by your investigation of yourself. 

Finally, or at least close enough to finally that our eyes were mostly glazed-over, he wrapped his administration's five-year environmental policy in these fatuous words: “Americans have never left our destiny to the whims of nature, and we will not start now.”

Case closed.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Katrina Wets the Pants of Both Parties

In the unfortunate utterances department, Rep. Tom Feeney of Florida alluded to suspension of the Davis-Bacon Act by saying “Lots of people in Louisiana are willing to go to work tomorrow, and the market will set the wage.” So, Republican Tom apparently wants no-bid contractors to be able to skin the victims for wages.

But if Democrats think they’re going to get a lot of mileage out of the current mismanagement of hurricane Katrina, they’ve another think coming.  This mess is a bipartisan disaster by every possible measurement.  Witness the recent Transportation Bill, a cornucopia of small minded big plans to bring home the bacon in every congressional district.

It’s always been that way, Katrina just makes it a little more evident.

So now, each party quick to draw blood with their long-simmering agendas, the Republicans hope to

• Permanently roll back the Davis-Bacon Act, written three quarters of a century ago to require federal contractors to pay prevailing wages
• Increasing by a hundred-fold the $2,500 limits to holders of federal credit-cards for no-bid spending
• Expanding school vouchers, using the displaced schoolchildren from Katrina damaged cities as an excuse
• Give money directly to faith-based groups for use as they see fit in the dissemination of social services (so much for the separation of faith-based and state)

For their part, the Democrats have been quick to come back with

• An expansion of Medicade for Katrina survivors, regardless of income
• Expanding the use of federal rent vouchers, again regardless of income
• A plan to drive a stake through the heart of further tax cuts for the wealthy

And so it goes, bad legislation for all the wrong reasons in order to out-headline the other party.  Tom DeLay’s spokesman was early out of the box with the statement that “the important thing is to empower and encourage anyone who is willing and able to help to administer emergency help.” That’s two ‘helps’ in one sentence, which may be dicey grammar but leaves out the most significant ‘help’ of all, the helping of one’s self to a part of that $250,000 credit card limit. 

Folks are just lined up to help with that.

Rep. John Dingell, a Democrat from Michigan, jumped into the quote race with a comment about opening Medicade to singles or childless couples. “Would you want to be the fellow that tells a single man or childless couple we’re going to take care of their next-door neighbor and we are not going to take care of them when both are wiped out by the flood? I don’t want to be the guy that does that.”

Apparently it’s perfectly all right to tell the single guy or childless couple they’re out of luck if they were wiped out by job loss or any of a number of catastrophes unrelated to Katrina.

Not content with that unfortunate utterance, Dingell went on to explain his motivation “is to help people who are desperate” and to give states an incentive to help survivors with health care “without going broke.”  It was unclear who was going broke, the people or the state.  But there was no doubt about John’s personal prejudice concerning which survival generates his (and his party’s) good will and which can go to hell, directly to hell, without passing GO. There are more reasons for desperation than hurricanes, John.

Dick Cheney said on September 10th, "There are a lot of lessons we want to learn out of this process in terms of what works.  I think we are in fact on our way to getting on top of the whole Katrina exercise." Listen for the sound of another towel being thrown in.  Nearly four years ago to the day, very nearly the same words were spoken at the World Trade Center.  The intervening time was an absolute dead-heat in Republican and Democratic incompetence.

In both cases, the only response Congress and the administration could muster was to spend their way into re-election.
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

The Lid Is Off the Honey Pot

Congress, never all that well known for thoughtful deliberation with a mid-term election coming up, has voted a torrent of hush-money for a babe named Katrina.  Anything to keep her quiet, anything at all.  Our behind-the-curve president has asked for nearly $70 billion in a week and if it takes a hundred, the votes are there. This last outpouring of money passed the House 410 to 11 and the Senate 97 to nothing. What voice of reason can be heard in that stampede?

Those who worry about pumping money faster than pumping water apparently haven’t listened to Tom DeLay. “We’ve got safeguards to ensure that the money is spent appropriately.”  This is the same Tom DeLay who is a whisker away from indictment in Texas for matters related to his PAC, matters of misappropriation and laundering.  So much for safeguards.  Senator Jeff Sessions, a Republican from a Gulf state (Alabama), says “We have all the earmarks of a rush to spend money that is very dangerous.”

Everybody in Washington is on this money train.  Louisiana plans to ask for billions (a hundred, two hundred?) to upgrade New Orleans levees, rebuild highways and infrastructure to lure back business.  Business has been voluntarily leaving New Orleans for two decades.  By 2050, the Gulf of Mexico is expected to be two to three feet higher than it now is and somebody better blow the whistle for a time-out before we find ourselves $25 billion down that hole in the ocean.

It may well be that politicians, historians and those who simply love the Crescent City’s vibrant past will have no real say in its future.  Insurance underwriting and development capital are likely to be unwilling to go where no Congressman fears to tread.  Capital markets have no nostalgia.  The difficulty is that a heap of money can be lost to infrastructure before that reality becomes clear.  The very first order of business should be to test the capital markets. Not with dreams, with commitments.

It’s not an opportune time to bring such things up, but I am not a politician with an election at hand and a badly bungled hurricane response.  New Orleans is, for the present, mostly a ghost town.  There is time and there is a deadly serious requirement to look at what we’re doing and why we are doing it. The hundred miles of shipping ports along the lower Mississippi don’t need New Orleans.  Neither does business, as its disproportionately vacant office buildings attest. 

When I was there six years ago, jazz could be found but you needed a deep breath and a guide to get past the hip-hop and techno to finally stagger into Preservation Hall. There is exquisite architecture in the wealthier neighborhoods, but the poverty and murder rates belie its reputation as a grand old city.  Nostalgia is not a reason for a city to exist, even if it were possible.

There is money that must be spent and spent immediately, but not for rebuilding.  Those who lost everything and have no resources must be clothed and fed, found jobs and their children educated.  If all else failed, we are large enough for that, must take those responsibilities and be grateful we are able.  This wide nation can easily accept two or three hundred thousand people and give them a lift.

I don’t doubt that we can control to an acceptable level of theft the money that might be spent to rebuild New Orleans.  That’s not my point. This city, by all logical standards of measurement, is no longer economically, historically or socially viable.

The past four years of this administration have increased our national indebtedness by a factor of 50% of all the debt this nation has acquired since 1776.  A three trillion dollar increase, three thousand billions shot down the pipe to our kids and grandkids.  Congress, in its unconscionable dereliction of fiscal duty, has made that possible.  $450 billion in 2002, $984 billion in 2003, $800 billion in 2004 and , between our undeclared and unfunded war, hurricane Katrina and the additional insanity of the Bush tax relief demands, probably another $1,000 billion this year.

With no end in sight but national bankruptcy. 

Mark Twain said it a hundred years ago, “It could probably be shown by facts and figures that there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”
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For more comments on Washington at work, see my personal web site.

Sitting On Trent Lott’s Porch

“The good news is---and it’s hard for some to see it now---that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before.  Out of the rubble of Trent Lott’s house---he’s lost his entire house---there’s going to be a fantastic house.  And I’m looking forward to sitting on the porch.”
                                                                  George W. Bush

Well, not with my $150 billion you’re not. 

A few days ago, W asked congress for $10.5 billion.  Now he’s gone back for another $51.8 billion.  Where do they come up with these numbers?  Is the .5 or the .8 really a necessary and integral part of the request?  Have they got it down to those fine details or is it all a smoke-screen because asking for $10 billion or $50 billion sounds too general, somehow fiscally ambiguous?

Trent Lott, the guy with the wrecked house and the lousy toupe is the same Trent Lott who, as a United States Senator, got the Deputy Assistant Army Secretary relieved of his duties as issuer of Gulf Coast permitting issues.  He tried to get him fired.  Didn't work. Michael Davis, the deputy, was guilty of trying to stop the Army Corps of Engineers from approving every casino application that came along.  And there were a bunch of them . . . twenty at least on the Louisiana coast alone. 

All twenty are now in the drink, along with Trent Lott’s house and the 16,000 jobs that went along with the slot machines.

Our forward-looking federal government builds bridges to undevelopable barrier islands so profit-looking developers (with the help of their local Trent Lott variant) can asphalt them over.  Selling off the gulf views without assessing the gulf storms is profitable business and enough pale northerners show up between and betwixt major hurricanes to sign on the dotted lines. 

Our government, in its wisdom and in support of such bright-eyed entrepreneurial developers, sells flood insurance.  FEMA does this.  They do it because no right-minded insurance company would touch it with a ten-fathom pole unless the feds guaranteed their losses.  FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the same wonderful people who brought you “New Orleans 2005, New Storms, New Challenges.”

Nature trumps the Army Corps of Engineers every time and nature’s way of mitigating coastal hurricanes is to build deltas and coastal marshes.  Instead, the COE dikes and dams the river, drains coastal wetlands (25 square miles a year on the Mississippi alone), paves over and extends.  Those who criticize that policy bear the wrath of the Trent Lotts and other coastal politicians.  With this hind-sight, W’s braggart expectation of sitting on Trent’s porch makes little sense. 

Not with my $150 billion isn’t a statement of unwillingness to rebuild when and where rebuilding makes sense.  But it is a recognition that the cycle of build and wreck, build and wreck . . . all with federal subsidies, is just nonsense.  Jane Bullock, Clinton’s chief of staff at FEMA, said there are two kinds of levees, those that have failed and those that will fail.

As I write this, no less than three glitz-buildings are approved for Biloxi and Gulfport.  The Shores of Paradise, planned for Biloxi is pictured on the left.  No doubt Trent will come roaring out of his Washington office in support of this project like a force-5 hurricane.  And when it’s built, when the developer retires to his plantation (located well inland) and the next big storm hits . . .

. . . the government check will be in the mail.  Drawn against your and my account.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site

Swoon and Wilt Take On a Whole New Meaning

I guess it depends upon how badly you want to flog the lack of actual news.  But it occasionally becomes comic and one can only wonder who edits AP.

An Associated Press article about today’s action in the stock markets is titled “Stocks Make Some Gains as Oil Prices Swoon.” A few paragraphs down they opt on “oil prices wilted from last week's record highs, falling more than $1 a barrel in mid-afternoon trading.”

That’s pretty strong stuff for a measly single-buck drop on $66.  When was the last time you described a six-tenths of one percent movement in the price of a commodity as a swoon or a wilt?

But it’s interesting, this oil-price thing, as a barometer of what might have been under slightly altered circumstances.  I remember $2 a barrel oil, but then I remember 22 cent Lucky Strikes as well.  If you live long enough almost anything in memory has changed significantly, most of them for the better.  Here in Europe where I live, it’s nothing new to plunk fifty bucks into the tank of my modest little Subaru.  That’s been the way it is over here since long before Iraq and everyone gets along just fine.  And although I hear some bitching, America seems to have borne up under the strain of $2.60 gasoline that we pay $4.50 to get.

That extra two bucks we pay (and have paid) over here is all taxes of course. 

But had we significantly taxed gasoline in the states, we’d be way closer to balancing our unbalanced balance of payments (intriguing sentence structure there), much less of a debtor nation and perhaps much more importantly, we’d have a differing view of what’s important and what’s not.  Such as four-bedroom homes with three-car garages for couples.  Such as pickup trucks and SUV’s for soccer-moms.  Such as other ways to power our cars and electric generating plants, our industry and homes.

It’s coming to that, you know. That's the inexorable direction of the world.  And, if you live long enough, you’ll tell your grandkids you are the last of the relics left over from the industrial dark-ages.  That’s what history is going to call the two hundred year period from about 1850 to 2050, the Industrial Dark Ages.  Those will be known as unenlightened times when ignorant humans took most of the buried fossil fuels of this earth and threw them into the atmosphere, a time akin in ignorance to the days of the Inquisition. Your grandkids will hardly believe anyone could have been so stupid, with a veritable cornucopia of available clean sources of energy at their disposal. 

But they’ll love you anyway, because you’re their granddad.
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A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

New Jersey in the Driver’s Seat

Liberty and Prosperity is the Garden State’s motto, but there’s not much garden left in a state that celebrates the most miles of highway and the most heavily traveled highways in the nation. A New York Times article suggests New Jersey is having a transportation meltdown.

There is a plan, a regional plan by (what better name?) the Regional Plan Association and, after looking in their crystal ball, they recognize that:

• State speed limits may have to be lowered (due to basically unsafe roads)
• Repair work on highways may have to be be deferred indefinitely (no money)
• Lane closures may occur over longer and longer periods of time
• Fewer trains and busses may be available, causing
• Longer delays and standing room only

The trust fund that finances highway and public transport in New Jersey is supposed to be sacrosanct and used for highways (?) and transport (?).  But liberties have been  taken by the legislature in the false sense of prosperity we all enjoyed in the 90's.  That lead to some poor choices. It wasn’t what the motto-makers had in mind when they crafted the state slogan, but then boys will be boys and most politicians are just kids at heart.. 

New Jersey is perhaps the best (though far from the only) example of elected officials putting off capital investment in infrastructure because it makes voters nervous and nervous voters tend to vote for someone else.

Infrastructure is that stuff that nobody sees, like:

• Sewer repairs
• Bridge repair and replacement
• Electric grid maintenance
• Water transmission systems

and a whole raft of other things, mostly underground.  But the part that’s currently falling apart that people do see is the road they drive on their way to work, the one traveled every day that’s suddenly taking twice as long to navigate.  Lots of heat on the acting-governor for findings of a commission empowered by the last elected governor, who then got himself in sexual hot-water and took a powder. 

Which is too bad, because Jim McGreevey (the guy who's gone) seemed to have the courage to at least talk about solving this problem while in office.

Optimists blame the put-it-off-until-later-and-finance-it boom years attitudes that then went bust in the dot.com meltdown.  Pessimists claim the old joke, “So you’re from New Jersey? What exit?” is just the tip of a very ugly transportation iceberg that's been decades underwater.  Realists think that New Jersey is way out there on the tip of the American transportation spear, as all of the nations major metropolitan areas become less and less navigable.  Drive-times by private automobile are taking up a higher and higher percentage of the working day as incidents of road rage increase and work place productivity plummets.

There are lots of places where it still makes sense to drive cars and the problem with most public transport proposals is that they deny that and lump all drivers as problems to be solved.  We are not all part of the problem.  But many of us are and we predominate in the urban centers, particularly along the east coast. In the short fifty years since Dwight Eisenhower gifted us with an Interstate highway network, it’s become unworkable near the cities it connects.

Jerseyites have shown us the future and it’s the near future rather than something that can once again be put off by jittery legislatures.  At a minimum we need smaller cars, running on hybrid fuels and a big investment in local light-rail transport. A visit to any European capitol will show the way. They did it, not because they were so much smarter than Americans, but because their cities never had room for cars and parking. 

Amtrak is not the answer and has proven it by low ridership except in the most congested Boston-Washington corridor.  But inner-city and intra-city light rail holds excellent prospects for alleviating the enormous load that private automobiles put on our land-use, commuting times and road maintenance issues.  President Bush is distracted by other issues in his presidency, but the congress can certainly address the issue. What’s needed is immediate planning by the cities most at risk and implementation of a federal funding program.

What we’ll get is anybody’s guess.

See Amtrak, that Damned Track

A Win For Everyone But Big Oil

Farmers win, the consumer at the pump wins, our nation's relief from the grip of the oil cartels wins, even the Florida and Gulf coast sugar industry wins if we follow and expand a tested and successful model.

Where’s that model?  Quick, show me.  That sounds like a national headline instead of a Saturday ho-hum article buried in the Washington Post.

Yeah, the model is Brazil.

Brazil?  Isn’t that in South America, that long, skinny country that covers almost the entire west coast?  No, that’s Chile.  Brazil is the big hunk of the country with a seashore on the east coast, home to the Amazon rain forest and Rio de Janeiro.  Enough geography . . .

Brazil is a sugar-cane growing country and the cane industry fluctuates wildly depending on world sugar markets, plus the fact that it’s an absolutely terrible place for people to work.  That, plus the high prices and diminishing oil resources worldwide, plus the fact that cane (along with corn, soybeans, beets, cornstalks and grass) is an easy ethanol source, plus the fact that ethanol runs fine in cars, plus the fact that it’s thirty or forty cents a gallon cheaper at the pumps, makes for a lot of pluses.

And a long list of perceived, but narrow-interest negatives: 

• Exxon and the boys aren’t really wired with that mind-set and so they keep on throwing money at Washington to keep renewable energy from happening. 
• Too disturbing to Shell et al profit structures
• Too much capital investment in old technologies
• What are we gonna do with all those drill-rigs and the prepaid bribes to various thugs around the world?
• What do we do with tanker fleets?
• No one at my country club even knows a cane-sugar grower.
• Does the Middle East matter without oil? Okay, that one’s not narrow interest.

Of course change will come, but only after we’ve dirtied-up the remaining pristine areas of the world, steam-rollered human rights in favor of petro-dollars in a few more of the ‘stans,’ further poisoned the politics of the have-nots in favor of the haves and warmed the planet to near extinction. We're currently mining oil in Canada. 

All of the above have a dollar value, but they are intrinsically life-style values.  It’s been an observation of mine that life-style has yet to yield to profit and this has made of me an advocate of follow-the-money when chasing bad guys and offer-the-money when enticing behavior.

With this in mind, I suggest administrations present and future offer outrageously advantageous tax breaks to Big Oil to refashion itself as Big Biofuel. I know it’s not a catchy name, but giving away most of the American West got the railroads built and they didn’t have a motto either, unless it was “Moving the Indians to Build California.”

• Thus will poor agricultural societies in temperate zones become less poor, growing various crops that are convertible to ethanol and thus will the increasing thirst (and ability to pay for) private automobiles be counterbalanced by environmentally sensitive fuels.
• Tanker owners can transport fuel instead of crude, as there’ll always be an imbalance between those who produce and those who consume. 
• Oil rigs can be left to rust, dismantled for scrap or painted silly colors and declared art objects. 
• The Middle East can once again become a nomadic land and sleep for an additional two thousand years.

Brazil’s Agriculture Minister said if the U.S. would open their markets by lowering tariffs and promoting flexible-fuel engine packages, they would contribute to both world prosperity and peace.  Yet my newspaper said that efforts to gain wide acceptance for biofuels in America have faced political, economic and technical obstacles not present in Brazil.  And I guess that’s right.  The moneyed interests in Brazil want it and those in America don’t.

It’s probably a deal-breaker.

A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

An Open Letter to Tony Blair

Dear Tony,

You’ve just been re-elected to a history-making third term as Prime Minister of Britain and you really don’t have to lick George Bush’s boots any longer.  Although it’s too late to redefine your position supporting the U.S. on Iraq, it’s a watershed moment in the world’s approach to warming.

You are the Chairman of next month’s annual G-8 meeting in Scotland.  Seven of the eight member countries are agreed on the wording of environmental standards.  The lone holdout is America and George Bush’s unreasonable behavior toward Kyoto and the world environmental crisis.

Tell him to take a hike.  There is absolutely nothing to lose and everything to gain, including a lasting place in history as the man who would not back away when principle opposed financial greed and finally succeeded.

Juliet Eilperin’s shocking article, U.S. Pressure Weakens G-8 Climate Plan, in Friday’s Washington Post hammers away at the same old issue . . .  that the Bush administration just doesn’t get it. We’re finally seeing what Dick Cheney was up to in those energy conferences he’s refused to divulge for the past four years.  Insider trading as energy policy, what else can you call it? 

No one even blinked when Phil Cooney, chief of staff on the White House Council on Environmental Quality got caught last week cooking the books on government climate change reports that were issued in 2002 and 2003. Before taking this sensitive job, Cooney headed the climate program at the American Petroleum Institute. Well, there’s an impartial guy. After being fingered last week, changing scientific findings to suit himself and his president, Cooney retired from government service.  This week he announced his new job . . . he plans to join Exxon Mobil, the world's largest oil company, this fall.

The wording of Cooney’s edited document will help determine or, more accurately, help limit and obfuscate what action the G-8 countries take as a group to combat global warming. The members, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Russia are all signatories to the Kyota Protocols and all in favor of strong language and stronger actions. Unanimous, but for one.

According to Eilperin’s account, one deleted section from the G-8 working copy cited “increasingly compelling evidence of climate change, including rising ocean and atmospheric temperatures, retreating ice sheets and glaciers, rising sea levels and changes to ecosystems.” Instead, U.S. negotiators inserted a sentence reading “climate change is a serious long term challenge that has the potential to affect every part of the globe.”

Long-term? Challenge?  Potential?  The North Pole can now be reached by boat.

So, c’mon you Group of Eight, refuse to go along.  Then perhaps you can truly hold up your heads as a group of eight instead of a group of seven dictated by one.

A bunch more environmental issues muddying the waters on my personal web site.

Spring Plowing on the Fish Farm

Been a long, long time since the head of the household walked into nearby woods to shoot something for dinner.

Yet there’s a lot of resistance to fish farming, as if it was really all that different from raising cattle. Conjure up an image of huge machines combing the forests with nets twenty miles long to catch meat for the dining table.  Squirrels, rabbits, raccoons and ground hogs along with deer, bear (for those with lustier appetites) and wild boar all tumbling into the nets as the forest floor is scraped clean of all vegetation. Not much left to eat and no shelter for whatever animals missed the nets.  That’s okay, there’s always another forest out there . . . or is there?

We gave up hunting with spears, bows and guns when civilized man divided up the chores and manufacturers made pencils, ranchers raised cattle.  Somehow we never gave up fishing in the wild, although we kept on improving the equipment while fish stocks worldwide went in the dumper and man kept on scouring the oceans. Possibly it’s because all this depletion-of-the-wild-species we call ‘commercial fishing’ occurs out of sight that we are so unconcerned by the duplicitous character of the industry.

I’m reminded of ‘market hunters’ providing wild ducks for the restaurants of Chicago during the thirties and forties. Using sneak-boats equipped with what amounted to small bow-mounted cannons, they 'sneaked' up on rafts of sleeping ducks in the southern Illinois flyway.  At an appropriate moonlit moment, they whistled, and when the ducks all raised their heads in alarm, fired off the bow gun.  A market hunter could kill a thousand ducks a night that way and did, until the mallard population dropped so precipitously that sporting wildfowlers lobbied for stricter controls.

There’s no one to lobby for ruined sport fishing, although trout fishermen are coming out against fish farming on the complaint that escaping farmed trout interbreed with wild trout and interfere with the species.  So far as I know there has been no parallel problem with Montana domestic sheep getting loose and ruining the genetics of the wild mountain sheep.  Hunters and fishermen value them equally, but I’m willing to agree that trout may be different.

Even so, protecting the wild trout seems too high a price for not farming various varieties of fish, lobsters, oysters, mussels, shrimp and whatever else market pressures may advance.  What we can do and should do is take a very close look at fish feeding, fertilization and antibiotic requirements and establish continually monitored acceptable rates.  That precaution has not been taken with meat production and we pay a huge price for that lack of intelligent control.  Ask anyone who lives near a hog operation.

So, fish farming will happen because it needs to happen and because the alternative is permanently damaged and dying oceans.  Not an option, no matter the opinions of trout fishermen.  But the trout fishermen remind us we need a 'canary in the mine' when it comes to safety issues in fish farming and for that we owe them thanks.

Wild Horses Couldn't Drag Me . . .

I stood at the head of kind of quiet looking wild Mustang my friend Angie had brought from Montana and I talked to it gently while she adjusted stirrup leathers on the saddle we’d been walking this horse under for a week.  It was zero-hour and time for her to ride him for the first time.  This was to be no wild-west show, the object was for Angie to merely put weight on the saddle and, if all went well, ease up and then on his back for just a few moments---not even move forward, just build tolerance, from which we hoped would come trust. That would be the limit of our small day’s progress and then we’d put the stallion away. We’d been handling the horse for two weeks and for the most part had avoided all confrontations.

This was 1955 and Angie was among the first eastern rich kids to try and save wild Mustangs from the killer yards by adopting.  You had to be rich to dabble in this dubious venture. Vanning a fractious, unbroken Mustang from Montana to Illinois and boarding it long enough to know if you had anything workable was expensive.  In those early days it was supposed that mature wild horses could be gentled and ridden for pleasure.  Wild Horses Wyoming and the Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary have since learned better and now limit their rescue operations to returning wild horses to relative wild, the private wild of big spreads in private hands.  At any rate, there I was, standing in front of this late-learner, holding the bridle and soft-selling all the gentle horse vocabulary I could think of in a near whisper as Angie applied her weight to the near-side stirrup . . . slo…wly, ever so slowly.

It was over so quickly I really have no idea what happened, but in less time than it takes to apply the period to this sentence, the stallion had snatched his bridle out of my hands, turned 180 degrees and kicked me hard enough that I landed some ten paces across the indoor arena in a heap.  Breathless and writhing, he’d apparently caught me with his leg rather than a hoof and I was uninjured other than having had the wind and considerable pride knocked out of me.  Accomplishing what he no doubt felt to be rough justice, the stallion just stood there, head a bit lowered and waiting for our next move.

Our next move was to put him away and Angie sent him the following week with a shipment of show horses headed west, to a friend’s ranch in Wyoming.  Our experiment ended with much money spent, good intentions thwarted and a much annoyed wild stallion turned back onto the range.  Fifty years later, absent the Horse Whisperer, that’s still the best most of us can manage.  Like Zebras, wild Mustangs are meant to live wild and the Bureau of Land Management and Department of Interior are left with the unenviable job of managing the herds.

‘Managing’ in bureau-speak usually means shooting, but 16 years after my humiliation at the south end of a Mustang headed north, Congress protected them from the bullet and instead allowed their slaughter for meat.  I have my own thoughts about that, arguing that it’s more trauma to a wild thing to be rounded up, transported, corralled and slaughtered than it is to be shot in the wild.  But Congress and a good many ordinary citizens have a problem with this particular kind of gun control.  The present herd of 37,000 horses is deemed by the BLM to be 9,000 too many for the range to sustain.  So, they’re rounding up and selling, as is their mandate.  Dog food, horsemeat to France for dining tables, or buy ‘em for retirement, take your pick of the not-so-pretty options.

Black Hills Wild Horse Sanctuary currently has about 400 horses and says that’s all they can manage.  Angie and I couldn’t manage even one, so I know their plight.  Wild Horses Wyoming bought out the last auction at about $50 a head and plans to provide for an ultimate herd approximating 5,000. The long-term logistics of these solutions shake out pretty quickly and it’s obvious that no matter how well-intentioned, adoptions aren’t going to do the trick.

It seems there are three possible solutions:

• Leave everything be and let nature set the rules as nature does with all things. If 37,000 horses are too many for the range, the weak ones will starve off and the herd will balance.
• The government has a lot of land . . . open up some more range and wait for that to overcrowd.
• Get seriously in the meat business.

My own vote tends toward nature setting the rules, because I think that man, no matter how well intentioned, usually comes up with awkward solutions.  There are exceptions, but those mostly have to do with hunting game-stocks and wild Mustangs are not game animals.

Nationwide, Mustangs are the small tip of an iceberg whose immense bulk is substantially the whitetail deer population in the suburban East.  A more immediate problem, people there are frustrated and desperate enough to shoot Bambi if only it were possible within crowded populations.  But Laramie, Wyoming (where the wild burros and wild horses play) remains the mystical (and mythical) American West in the eyes of congressmen and animal activists. 

I applaud their sensitivity but think the world is becoming less and less a place where the truly wild can find accommodation alongside man.

Say What?

It’s economic to drill for oil a half a world away, transport that oil great distances by pipeline to ports, load it on to gigantic tankers to move across thousands of miles of ocean, then offload to refineries, crack the crude into a myriad of products, truck those various fuel products to retail outlets in a vast commercial network to sell to Uncle Charlie for his SUV.

Too long a sentence.  I know.  That was part of the point.

Yet (adverb introducing the second part of the point) in a world that’s four-fifths salt water, suffering agricultural drought and lacking viable human water resources, we deem it uneconomic to desalinate.

Is there something wrong with this mind-set?  Should we be doing something about it before the western U.S. blows away?  Do I have my senator’s phone number here somewhere?

So far, the answer is no to all of the above.

Time For the Landscape Architects

And I am one, first off I have to own up to that. For thirty-five years I had my own private landscape architectural practice in the Chicago area.

Disclaimers aside, it’s past time for my profession to be invited in to ameliorate the  “bunkerization” of Washington, as well as our embassies and corporate entities around the world. For one thing, there’s no need to be ugly to be safe and for the second and more important reason, we can ill afford to showcase democracy behind barbed-wire and concrete crash barriers. The problem lies in the frantic call for quick solutions, exacerbated by a mind-set that sees the need as temporary when it is not. The problem is long-term and quite probably permanent, a fact requiring re-thinking of the mindless road-barrier mindset that currently shapes our response to threat.

There are indeed better ways . . . even the old castle-moat was an aesthetically pleasant place to rain arrows upon an attacker. For the most part, security is terrain driven . . . keep the bad guys away from the target and terrain is for the most part manageable. In close-up circumstances such as inner city locations the solution is more difficult and may consist of blast-shielding inside the ground and first floors of buildings as well as beefing up interior structural support, none of which need visually interfere with an exterior façade. In more concentrated venues (and historic Philadelphia is certainly one) our founding architecture and its ancillary modern structures might well be made into pedestrian zones, as is common in historic European city centers. That will hardly stop a backpacker bomb, but  backpacker bombs are unstoppable, as Israel has come to know.

Where there is additional space (and certainly monumental Washington falls into this category), lakes, streams, retaining walls, berms and clusters of trees will serve admirably to screen a more serious purpose. Consider stopping vehicles by use of beautiful cast-iron bollards sprinkled among  clusters of shade trees, underpaved with flagstone or brick. Meandering moats serve a similar purpose . . . they need not even be pedestrian unfriendly, easily grillworked over in such as way as to support people but not vehicles. If gun or rocket fire is the threat, groupings of trees can screen bulletproof glass shields within their groves.

There is almost no terrorist threat that can’t be as effectively disarmed by attractive solution as by the heavy-handed techniques presently being used. As always, the most creative solutions are within the purview of private enterprise rather than bureaucracies. One can hardly imagine a worse idea than giving over such responsibility to the Corps of Engineers or Parks Department.

And finally, we must accept as a nation the reality that no target can be made entirely safe from attack and barricading our democracy is too high a price to pay, both in dollars and in terms of comfortable enjoyment. The annual spring parade of the nation’s schoolchildren to witness the cherry blossoms in our capitol must not become another lesson in how fearful we have become. Thomas L. Friedman, the NYT columnist is correct when he says “We have to find a way of defending ourselves from others' weapons of mass destruction without losing our own weapon of mass attraction.” 

The American Society of Landscape Architects (headquartered of course in Washington) stands ready to recommend firms with international reputations, as well as highly talented small offices to consult with the anti-terror specialist of your choice.

. . . they’re in the book.

That Horse Is Long Gone

Today’s lead Washington Post editorial, Arctic Thaw, reaffirms a point of view that has been meaningless for three decades, that moves must be made by the industrial world to slow, prevent and reverse global warming.

Sorry, globe, but that horse left the barn a way long time ago and what was once opportunity galloped away in hot pursuit.

Even the strictest enforcement of the Kyoto Protocols, which we as Americans don’t belong to anyway, would merely hope to freeze greenhouse gas production at turn-of-the-century levels and those levels are already melting the planet’s ice. So, we are left with the world as it is instead of the world as we would have it. No blame here, no shaking of fists, no screaming across police barriers, just a realization.

Those realizations are going to have a profound affect on nation-building and the real estate and building industry in all its forms. A new nation will certainly have to be constructed for Holland, a.k.a. the Dutch, a.k.a. the Netherlands as their nation becomes some of the best bass-fishing in Europe. The world population’s propensity for building cities along the shores of various oceans will have vast populations tippy-toeing to higher ground and thus the realtors will slap ‘ocean-front’ designations on properties upgraded from their old ‘ocean-view’ status. Florida will mostly just disappear and who can possibly deserve it more? Ditto Wall Street, Trump Tower and a thousand kosher delicatessens (the deli’s will be missed). All in good fun and profits to be made, so we’ll learn to cope and roll with the punches.

A punch not so easy to roll with is the inundation of seawater way, way, way upstream in most of the world’s important rivers and the corresponding overpowering of a large percentage of freshwater aquifers. Agricultural resources may be halved.

George Carlin once said “I’m tired of all this bitching about the planet being in trouble. The planet is not in trouble, the planet is just fine. People are in trouble.” And of course George is absolutely right. That line, which once brought a sort of gotcha-moment of revelation, now brings sort of an oops-look and oops, as we all know, is the past tense of oh-my-god-I-think-I’m-about-to (spill this coffee, drop this ice cream cone, get really wet feet).  Anyway, too late to close this barn door.

It all happened on someone else’s watch, during someone else’s presidency and in the endlessly current quarters of someone else’s annual report. It had more scientists shouting and pointing, more experts witnessing and giving testimony and more Greenpeacers driving up and down the oceans in inflatable boats than the public memory could hold in its excitable mind. And thus it became that dreary old scolding with which we soon became impatient. But it’s nice to see the Washington Post drag it out again and put it at the head of their editorial page.

Kind of like waving flags at an army long departed.