Needlenose

Tell me this ain’t so…another rig in the Gulf of Mexico just exploded.

Just in case you forgot why nuclear energy is so bad, here is an unpleasant reminder from Chernobyl – the wildfires are near the contaminated area – a burn in the region could release radioactive ash.

Just as BP shuts down the undersea gusher, some drunken redneck smashes his boat into a small wellhead in the Gulf of Mexico.  What are the odds that this could happen?  Well they have a lot of boat-driving drunken rednecks down there in the Gulf, and a lot of wells and pipelines…

The People’s Republic of China has surpassed the U.S. in energy usage.  Seems like only yesterday when CMike was berating me for negatively comparing Chinese output of CO2 to that of the U.S.  That’s a first-place we really didn’t need

The cost of oil.  The cost of coal.  The cost of wind power.

*Update* Tip of the  ’Nose to MIT Buddy: On Faux News they are saying that Obama and the Liberals sabotaged the oil rig.  DrudgeIdiot is calling the spill Obama’s Katrina.  Those fuckers are evil and stupid:

Just how stoopid are Fox viewers?

There is one silver lining to Teddy Kennedy’s demise – the Cape Cod Wind Farm project will now go forward.  The Kennedy family, if you remember, were opposed on the ground that the distant rotors might spoil their privileged view.

We may have invented the solar cell, but China has taken the lead in manufacturing solar panels – and wind turbines as well, to add a little salt into the wound.

President Obama, in his State of the Union speech last week, sounded an alarm that the United States was falling behind other countries, especially China, on energy. “I do not accept a future where the jobs and industries of tomorrow take root beyond our borders — and I know you don’t either,” he told Congress.

That’s just rhetoric, Mr. President, Congress wants whatever their corporate masters tell them to want.  And in spite of what Justice Alito  may have been muttering during your speech, that’s regardless of where those corporate masters may live.  Multinationals just follow the money.

Some encouraging news via the Washington Post today:

President Obama is likely to endorse using a portion of the government’s $700 billion financial bailout for a new jobs creation program during a speech about the economy next week, Press Secretary Robert Gibbs told reporters Friday morning.

“The president thinks we should and must do everything in our power to create an environment for job growth and job creation,” Gibbs said. When asked whether Obama will talk about the use of TARP funds on Tuesday, Gibbs said, “I think that’s likely.”

About $139 billion of the Troubled Assets Relief Program, or TARP, remains unallocated and available to the administration. Banks have paid another $10 billion in interest and dividends to the Treasury and returned about $71 billion in aid, the Treasury reported in November. This week, Bank of America announced it would repay its $45 billion package.

As recently as this week, Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner has said he wants to dedicate much of the unspent TARP money to reduce the national debt. But House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Cal.) and other top Democrats have been crafting a jobs bill that would tap the bailout program. The size of the repayments from once shaky banks may make it possible to accomplish both goals.

. . . Gibbs said the president is likely to talk about multiple ideas for job creation, some of which would require congressional approval. The Tuesday speech at the Brookings Institution follows a day-long jobs summit Thursday and a trip to Allentown, Pennsylvania on Friday to highlight the plight of workers.

This weeklong focus on creating jobs is a refreshing sign that Obama and his top advisers did not, in fact, forget all of their political skills shortly after taking office.

Matt Yglesias adds that the President may be remembering a thing or two about basic messaging as well:

… once Obama’s Allentown event got into the Q&A section it got really good. What was interesting about it was that everything Obama said was so banal. It was elementary, back-to-basics, “I’m a Democrat” kind of stuff… He wasn’t even really all that feisty. But he got out and talked basic politics—who’s on your side, who’s fighting for change, and who’s responsible for protecting the status quo.

In other words, Obama is rediscovering the importance of the fundamental things that got him elected.

There’s a massive element of political calculation involved here, obviously — not just a president taking action to stop the downward drift of his poll numbers, but the Democrats in general needing to provide a positive political message going into 2010.

Even if the stimulative impact of whatever “jobs bill” gets passed is relatively small, much of the money from last spring’s economic-recovery package is still due to be spent this coming year.  Giving voters a fresh reminder that Democrats took action will be important for them in taking credit for whatever improvement occurs in the job market, regardless of the cause.

But at least this is the good kind of political calculation… the kind that comes from elected officials realizing they’re accountable for producing positive results for the people who put them in power.  Frankly, we could do with a bit more of it.

(Cross-posted at Firedoglake.)

So you thought the bogus mortgage derivative/housing bubble burst was all the fault of venal Repug politicians killing Glass-Steagall combined with greedy Wall Street Bankers creating and selling worthless derivatives without any oversight from the Shrubya misAdministration?  Well think again!  According to financial services consultant Edward Pinto, it’s all ACORN’s fault!  Shame the Repug College student didn’t prank ‘em a few years ago by walking into the ACORN office with some repacked subprime loan-based derivatives to sell….

In case you are interested, based on his campaign contributions and clientele, Edward Pinto looks like an active Repug, and though I think his ACORN assertions are laughable, he did provide Congress with some pretty good advice on fixing the lending side of the equation.

Depleted versus rich topsoil

There have been a series of interesting articles recently regarding the future of agriculture, and it’s not what you’d think.  In fact some future trends seem rather ancient.

First let’s start with the key problem.  Today’s methods, let’s call them 2.0, aren’t sustainable.  Current methods cause major erosion and lead to loss of topsoil and exhaustion of the land.  And topsoil recovery is a slow process, growing maybe as fast as 3cm/year in wet conditions and significantly more slowly in arid conditions.

Key nutrients are lost as well due to our ‘flooding’ irrigation techniques combined with radically modified urban and suburban land use that speeds runoff water along with key nutrients towards the ocean, rather than capturing them on land.  One such ingredient is phosphorus.  Worried about ‘peak oil?”  Well you can live without oil, but the food we eat needs phosphorus, and scientists are already talking about hitting peak phosphorus in 25-75 years unless we take steps to recapture it.

Potassium, another key ingredient, is a bit more plentiful but current irrigation practices leach that from soil as well.  Ironically land’s loss is the ocean’s loss as well, as injecting large amounts of these plant nutrients leads to fish-killing algal blooms – in large amounts these are awful pollutants.

So where does agriculture need to go?  Back to the Future.  One interesting trend is ‘no-till’ agriculture.  Before there was tilling, our distant proto-urban ancestors used a pointed stick to dig a hole in the ground to plant a seed.  The benefit here is that if you don’t breakup the sod, you don’t get erosion and you don’t lose most of your key nutrients to runoff.  Read the linked article, there is a bit more tech (and less effort) involved in today’s no-till than poking holes in the ground with a pointy-stick.

The other trend, while also ‘old school’ requires a bit more high tech to achieve reasonably high yields – moving towards perennial crops and away from annual crops.  Most of our current foodstuffs are annuals as is all our cereals.  However, some cereals have perennial variants that scientists are breeding or tinkering with (thus the high tech), to bring yields up to levels closer to annual crops.

This is a complementary trend to the no-till as growing a perennial is essentially a no-till operation.  It has the added benefit though of enhancing soil nutrients throw nitrogen-fixing and further stabilizing the topsoil through complicated root structures.

You know as a kid I believed the sci-fi depictions of us eating goo from tubes and robots tending hydroponic farms, but with peak oil, peak phosphorus and all the other problems that agriculture and industry 2.0 have left us with, I’m figuring the farms of the future would be far more familiar to a time-traveling denizen of Çatal Höyük than a U.S. farm from the 1960s.