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.
Mythbusters use golfball effect to boost fuel efficiency
Every time Congress considers boosting vehicle fuel efficiency via CAFE standards, the auto industry lobbyists descend on the Capitol to bleat about how higher mileage targets will bankrupt the industry.
I was watching a recent episode of Mythbusters where they ‘dimpled’ a car to see if the dimples would improve the laminar flow and reduce drag like they do on a golfball.
In spite of adding 800 lbs to the weight of the pictured sedan (car was coated in clay rather than denting the metal to get dimples), they were able to increase cruising fuel efficiency 11% !! Could you imagine what the auto industry could achieve by throwing some skilled engineers and designers on this? Hell, if they’d just produce cars with an actual streamlined design (rather than what people think is streamlined), they’d greatly increase fuel efficiency.
Malthus is alive and well and living in the 3rd World
The UN figures we’ll need to increase food production by 70% over the next 40 years to keep hundreds of millions from starving. Looking at historical food production trends, it seems like cereal production has sort of kept pace with population growth (although seafood production has pretty much peaked if not actually declined a bit). But historical trend analysis doesn’t take into account the projected negative impact of global warming on crop production.
Or more immediately, it doesn’t take into account the growing diversion of cereal crops into biofuels (a process actually subsidized by your tax dollars so you can pay more to fill both your tank and your tummy!), nor the challenges of worldwide water stress.
Until now the trends have supported the self-indulgent skeptics (those fortunate enough to live in the developed world at least) who have blithely scoffed the warnings of the food-security crowd. However we’re looking at a ‘perfect storm’ of factors that will throw ever larger populations of folks in various regions into the food have-not category much earlier than that in the UN 40-year time frame.
*Update* Just to put this in perspective, UN says 1 in 6 people are facing famine today as developed countries both cut food aid and increase biofuel subsidies.
…Far East. I’m really happy for the Chinese, really I am, when I hear that their economy is booming again, although admittedly I’d be happier if our own recovery wasn’t jobless. Still, Horace Greeley’s advice to a job seeker: “Go West, Young Man,” is relevant once again, assuming you go so far West that you are in the Far East.
There is a growing trend for young job seekers to look for work in China. It’s only a matter of time before the “Chinese Only” and the “Red Brigade” Minutemen movement arise to protest American illegals sneaking over to the new land of opportunity.
I’ve whined before about the lack of an affordable plug-in hybrid car on the market in the US. I’m feeling the first twinges of hope now, though – Giant Blue Locust Buddy sent me a link to a comprehensive list of electric vehicles and their current status.
Of course there is nothing this year, but in 2010 at some point there may be a couple of choices that aren’t the $100K Tesla. Now if my cheesy old car can just hold out until then…
From the Washington Post this morning:
U.S. to Wind Down Help for Some Banks
Stress Tests Find Most Can Absorb Losses
The government signaled yesterday that its financial rescue efforts may have reached their high-water mark, announcing that the much-anticipated “stress tests” of 19 large banks showed that only one, GMAC, was likely to need additional taxpayer aid and that it would begin to unwind assistance for the healthiest firms.
Despite a deepening recession and projections that banks will continue to lose money, the government will require the firms to increase their combined capital by as little as $9.5 billion. [. . .]
From the Onion earlier this week:
Nation Ready To Be Lied To About Economy Again
After nearly four months of frank, honest, and open dialogue about the failing economy, a weary U.S. populace announced this week that it is once again ready to be lied to about the current state of the financial system.
Tired of hearing the grim truth about their economic future, Americans demanded that the bald-faced lies resume immediately, particularly whenever politicians feel the need to divulge another terrifying problem with Wall Street, the housing market, or any one of a hundred other ticking time bombs everyone was better off not knowing about. [. . .]
I’m just sayin’…