The Europeans are looking at constructing solar-thermal power stations and taking the power across the Mediterranean. It’s called Desertec.
Right now, the cost is seen as about twice that of coal, but this should improve over time.
If only the US had some desert areas, perhaps we could try the same thing.
I would suggest that people look at this analysis of London’s congestion pricing scheme.
Basically, they have license plate scanners set up at entry points around central London, and commuters are charged £8 per day to enter the center city (residents get a discount).
The proceeds from this charge go to mass transit.
Before implementing this, London speeds were less than 10 miles per hour, with 30% of the time being sitting not moving at all.
The impact of the scheme exceeded expectations. In the first year of the charge, traffic delays in London dropped by 30 percent, journey time reliability increased by 30 percent, and average speeds rose 17 percent, reflecting a sharp fall in traffic jams at intersections (the time spent traveling at speeds less than 6 mph decreased by one-third). The charge also changed who was using the roads: private car trips dropped by 34 percent, and trucks and vans by 5 to 7 percent, but bus, taxi, and bike trips all rose sharply. The overall impact was a noticeable improvement in traffic conditions.
The London experience has also shown that it’s possible – and important – to spread the benefits of congestion pricing widely. By committing to plough all the revenues raised by the congestion charge into public transportation improvements, London has ensured that congestion pricing didn’t just improve mobility for car drivers who can pay the charge (the “Lexus lanes” problem) but also increased access to the city centre for everyone. Innovative policies, such as the popular mass bike-share program in Paris, can also help to spread the benefits.
This is simple, it can be implemented in a matter of months, and it is revenue positive, which makes it too sensible to happen here.
Bloomberg tried to implement it in New York City, and the state legislature shot it down.
Dave Roberts of the Gristmill gets it right. At a meeting on environmental policy, he made the point that Republicans really don’t have detailed or credible global warming ideas, and someone scolded him for, “making it a political issue.”
His response is spot on:
It’s something I hear a lot, and I remain utterly baffled by it. The assumption seems to be that politics is bad and that the ideal state would be unity. That’s just … creepy. This is an enormously significant policy challenge facing a democracy, where different citizens and groups have different assessments of the problem and different proposals for solving it, arising from different interests. In other words, it is political. Politics is the means by which people resolve their disputes. The only practical way of achieving unity is by suppressing dissent.
Basically, the question is whether climate is stable, like a ball in a bowl, or metastable, like a ball on a flat spot on a hill, which, with a sufficient nudge will careen down the hill accelerating.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is now warning that once that ball is pushed too hard, it will start accelerating on its own.
I tend to agree, particularly when one considers things like hydrates on the ocean floor, and the massive amount of organic material that would start to decompose and emit gasses in the tundra areas of the world.
It appears that Floridahas decided that it will not play nice with Georgia regarding water during the ongoing drought.
I’m not sure why, though with rain predicted in the next week, the point may be moot.
That being said, all this is like two kids throwing spitballs, compared to the inevitable water wars in the Western US, these are arid regions to begin with, they have experienced explosive population growth, and the source of much of the water, the Ogallala Aquifer, is largely primeval water, and recharges very slowly, so this will get very, very ugly.
Of course, global warming makes this all a crap shoot.
“There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.”
Raymond Chandler, Red Wind
I guess that the Santa Ana winds cause fires too, and pretty bad ones at that. I can’t add much to this news except this picture:
The base would likely be located near Barrow, Alaska.
It will handle the expansion of traffic in the Arctic Ocean, and will coordinate traffic through the Bering Strait with the Russians.
When there is an open path during the summer months, which appears to be happening ahead of the worst cases given by climate change scientists, the traffic through such a “Northwest Passage” could be significant, and would require significant monitoring and aid by coast guards of all the nations on the arctic ocean.
Needless to say, this is a rather profound manifestation of global warming, notwithstanding the protestations of the global warming deniers.
Joel Kovel ran against Hillary Clinton for Senate as a Green, and he typifies the smug, sanctimonious, and ineffective mindset that is the US Green Party.
I concur with Brad Delong. Where was Kovel when Al Gore was proposing a BTU tax to reduce carbon emissions in 1993.
People like Kovel are personally comfortable with the status quo, but want to feel virtuous, so they set the bar so high that it can never be attained, while they can still feel smug, superior, and sanctimonious.
I love that Paul Krugman is no longer behind the NY Times firewall, because he just took a marvelous shot at the wingnuts, and in particularly at Charles Krauthammer*, when he described their reaction to his Nobel Piece Prize as, “Gore Derangement Syndrome“.
Just go read it. Hell, go read everything that Krugman writes.
*Krauthammer coined the term “Bush Derangement Syndrome”, one of his many violations of the canon of ethics for a psychiatrist, which prohibits this sort of long distance diagnosis under the color of professional authority.
That sound that you hear ius wingnut heads exploding at the news. Heh.
Maybe they will turn their guns away from the Frost Family now, at least a bit.
That being said, I sand by my earlier prediction: Albert Gore will not be running for president in 2008. He’s happy doing what he’s doing right now, and he knows that the presstitutes will come after him if he runs.
Here is the picture, taken before the award, that convinced me that he is not running. This is not the face of Gore running for president:
Yes, Al Gore has been nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize.
If he wins, he’s going to make the wingnut freak out over Jimmy carter look like a bloody pick nick.
heh
Kevin Drum expresses a similar sense of Schadenfreude.
For those of you who are not American, or are too young to remember him, Eddie Haskell is a character from an almost year old comedy, “Leave it to Beaver*“. He was the friend of the title character’s older brother, and a repulsive troublemaker who never failed to suck up to the adults when they were around†.
Well, it appears that Admiral William Fallon, chief of the Central Command (CENTCOM), and the good general’s boss feels much the same way about Petraeus as the audience was supposed to about Eddie Haskell. It has been reported that the admiral told the general that he thought he was:
“an ass-kissing little chickens*it” and added, “I hate people like that”, the sources say. That remark reportedly came after Petraeus began the meeting by making remarks that Fallon interpreted as trying to ingratiate himself with a superior.
Of note, Fallon appears to be a stand up guy, who is doing major pushback against the politicization of the military, and he has been steadfast, in opposing an attack on Iran.
Fallon acquired a reputation for a willingness to stand up to powerful figures during his tenure as commander in chief of the Pacific Command from February 2005 to March 2007. He pushed hard for a conciliatory line toward and China, which put him in conflict with senior military and civilian officials with a vested interest in pointing to China as a future rival and threat.
He demonstrated his independence from the White House when he refused in February to go along with a proposal to send a third naval carrier task force to the Persian Gulf, as reported by IPS in May. Fallon questioned the military necessity for the move, which would have signaled to Iran a readiness to go to war. Fallon also privately vowed that there would be no war against Iran on his watch, implying that he would quit rather than accept such a policy.
It should also be noted that the General’s duties in Iraq had been securing arms Saddam’s military, the ones that are used against us, and training the Iraqi police force, the one that is a Shia militia actively engaging in ethnic cleansing.
Let us pray that there are more Fallons than Petraeus in the Pentagon.
Sorry if this is old news, but Rosh Hashana has gotten me a bit behind.
*This show had what had to be the most unintentionally sexual line on TV of the day, at least until Batman’s gay innuendo, “Gee Ward, weren’t you a bit hard on the Beaver last night?”
†It should be noted that the actor who played him, went on to become a police officer, and was shot in the line of duty, forcing his retirement from the force, so he was nothing like Eddie.
A genetic study the Eastern Pacific Gray Whale population has indicated that the pre whaling population was 5x what was previously thought, indicating that the recovery is 5x as anemic as was previously though.
More significantly, it means that the Eastern Gray Whales population of 20,000, Western Gray Whale population is in the few hundred range, is still well below the carrying capacity of their habitat, and that the increasing number of malnourished whales found are an indication of another problem threating their food supply.
The most likely culprit is global warming.
The strength of this hurricane has caught forecasters by surprise, but it’s an artifact of the increasingly warm summer Caribbean.
I could not resist the pun in the title, sorry.
After the Russians planted a flag on the sea bed at the North Pole, it was inevitable that some sort of scramble for the arctic regions would commence. Now Canada is building a deep water port facility on Baffin Island.
There are two things driving this:
While it has been clear for some time that Pat Tillman’s death resulted in an orgy of military ass covering, it now appears that there are uninvestigated evidence of foul play, so the friendly fire might not be so friendly.
It’s already clear that Tillman, who was killed in Afghanistan, did not like Bush, and thought that Iraq was an illegal war, but here are the quick points of the article:
The above General is being demoted, BTW.
Let me be the first to say:
Don’t let the door hit you on the butt on the way out, loser.
Altitude Drop For Lieberman the Hawk
by Steve Kornacki
Early last week, a distressing, if not entirely unsurprising, Newsweek poll found that fully 40 percent of American adults continue to believe that Iraq was directly involved in the 9/11 attacks.It must, then, have been this exasperating chunk of the electorate that Joe Lieberman had in mind when he declared Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” that Democrats are doomed in the 2008 presidential race unless they re-embrace the Iraq War.
“I think that’s the best tradition of our party, and if we don’t recapture it … the Democratic candidate is going to have a hard time winning that election next year,” Mr. Lieberman said, likening his own hawkish Iraq posture to Harry Truman, John F. Kennedy, Hubert Humphrey, and Henry “Scoop” Jackson – all of them much too deceased to protest such a questionable comparison.
Ouch!!!!!
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Given the Senate’s partisan balance – 49 Republicans, 49 Democrats (one still recuperating from a December cerebral hemorrhage), and two tie-breaking independents who caucus with the Democrats – Democrats are still technically at Mr. Lieberman’s mercy, their fragile control of the chamber dependent on his continued willingness to live up to his campaign pledge to side with his old party for organizational purposes.
But it’s now apparent that they need nothing more than that from him. Republicans have labored to portray Mr. Lieberman’s defeat in last year’s Senate primary as evidence that the Democratic Party has been over-run by weak-willed McGoverniks, a contention that Mr. Lieberman, in making reference to Democrats’ past vulnerabilities on foreign policy and national security issues, sought to reinforce on Sunday.
That game, however, has ceased to work. In years past – 2004 and 2002, say – a public association with Mr. Lieberman was helpful to Democrats, a reassurance to a more hawkish electorate that they were as “tough” as the G.O.P. But in 2007, embracing Mr. Lieberman’s intransigence is a decided political liability – evidenced most startlingly by a recent poll that found that even 58 percent of Republicans in Iowa want a troop withdrawal in the next six months. When, as he did on Sunday, Mr. Lieberman uses a national television interview to dust off old attacks on the Democratic Party’s foreign policy credentials while at the same time actually declaring that “the surge is working,” it only benefits his former party’s standing with the war-wary public. There are few, if any Democrats, quaking at his threat to endorse a Republican in ’08.
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Those politicians are on the run to catch up with the public before November 2008. Mr. Lieberman should probably consider himself lucky that his seat was up last year – and not next year.
You this whole “fight them there so we don’t have to fight them here”, bulls$%@ is going swimmingly.
We have created a petri dish for terrorists, and proving and training grounds for tactics ant technology to be used against us.
If this is safer, I’m going to have start taking up French Kissing Cobras as a hobby.
Taliban adopt deadly Iraqi tactics
6 Canadian soldiers and interpreter die as insurgents use powerful bomb against Canada’s strongest troop carrierGRAEME SMITH
July 5, 2007
KANDAHAR, AFGHANISTAN — Six Canadian soldiers and their interpreter died yesterday as the Taliban continued to launch bold attacks inside zones considered mostly pacified, shifting their tactics toward the kind of bombings that have proved devastating in Iraq.
About a dozen military vehicles, Canadian and Afghan, were driving west along a gravel road after finishing a search of a village about 20 kilometres southwest of Kandahar city, when a powerful bomb detonated at 11 a.m. local time.
The explosion engulfed an RG-31 Nyala troop carrier, a vehicle manufactured in South Africa and specifically designed with a boat-like hull to withstand mine blasts. It’s the Canadians’ strongest vehicle against roadside bombs, but the insurgents have recently been wiring up bigger caches of ordnance and more sophisticated-shaped charges into their so-called improvised explosive devices, breaking through even the best armour.
“We’re not perfect and we do miss some, as we have seen today,” said Brigadier-General Tim Grant, the top Canadian commander in Afghanistan. “But the battle against the Taliban and the battle against their choice of weapons, IED, is successful.”
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As I have said before, AW&ST has a fairly right wing editorial page, and this an indication that the scientific whores trying to cast doubt on global warming have lost.
U.S. Global Warming Initiative Is A Step Backward (Subscription Required)
Aviation Week & Space Technology
06/11/2007, page 66Open a good book on global warming and in its index you will find references to a wealth of data and analysis from NASA Earth sciences flight programs and scientists, as well as to their contribution to the growing awareness and understanding of risks our planet faces from greenhouse gases.
Thus it is a mystery how NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin, could have become so entangled during a National Public Radio interview on May 31, and how President Bush could have come up with so passive a greenhouse-gas proposal for last week’s Group of 8 meeting in Germany.
Griffin is a very smart man who sometimes says not-so-smart things. He did it again on NPR, commenting that he couldn’t say whether global warming is “a long-term concern.” When a dumbstruck interviewer followed up, asking whether Griffin had “any doubt that this is a problem that mankind has to wrestle with,” the administrator waded in up to his waist. “To assume that [warming] is a problem is to assume that the state of Earth’s climate today is the optimal climate . . . and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn’t change.”
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