Monthly Archives: February 2008

How Can You Not Love China’s Position on Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

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China is calling for adherence to the Kyoto Protocol to “tackle climate change.” Following the Kyoto Protocol means other nations should hobble their economies by capping greenhouse gas emissions, while China is free to continue to increase their greenhouse gas emissions (even though they are the #1 carbon dioxide emitter in the world). China View reports:

“As a precondition of ensuring healthy human development, tackling climate change is today’s and tomorrow’s basic principle with which we should persist in confronting the problem,” said Cao.

“Common but differentiated responsibilities” stated in the Kyoto Protocol and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change should be the basis and precondition for a rational move in handling climate change, he said.

The Chinese legislator said at the forum that “China, as a responsible country, has a resolute and consistent policy in dealing with climate change.”

China will do its “best to boost its capability” to fight climate change based on China’s reality, said Cao.

“Common by differentiated responsibilities” is UN bureaucrat code for caps on greenhouse gas emissions for developed countries, but no caps for countries like China, India, and over 100 other countries. Never mind that the vast majority of new emissions will come from these developing countries.

I love the quote that “China, as a responsible country, has a resolute and consistent policy in dealing with climate change.” This is true–China first cares about its economic development and second (or third, or fourth, or one hundred the sixty-seventh) they care about reducing greenhouse gas emissions. That is their policy on climate change.

Hey Big Spender

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President Bush has managed to spend money at a rate that is unparalleled in modern times:

If President Bush’s budget for fiscal 2009 is approved in its current form, U.S. government spending will have increased by more than $1.2 trillion since President Clinton left office; adjusted for inflation, that’s a 35% increase. Bush has increased spending at three times the rate Clinton did when he was president, and also has given us the biggest defense budget since World War II — and that’s regularly budgeted defense spending, not counting funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

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The president’s projections show the budget running a surplus of $48 billion by fiscal 2012. That fantastical figure includes some rosy assumptions — that the Democrats in Congress enact Bush’s proposal to trim the growth of Medicare and Medicaid by $195.7 billion over five years; that the alternative minimum tax is allowed to hit more taxpayers after the 2008 tax year; and that the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are not funded beyond fiscal 2009. Even if all that came true, the White House should be focusing on reducing the size of government, not just reducing overspending.

The $3.1-trillion fiscal 2009 budget proposal represents Bush’s last chance to establish his legacy. Unfortunately, it will be one of massive deficit spending that will be paid for by generations to come.

Obama’s agenda is “completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive…”

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Robert Samuelson isn’t exactly impressed with Obama’s actual policy prescriptions:

It’s hard not to be dazzled by Barack Obama. At the 2004 Democratic convention, he visited with Newsweek reporters and editors, including me. I came away deeply impressed by his intelligence, his forceful language and his apparent willingness to take positions that seemed to rise above narrow partisanship. Obama has become the Democratic presidential front-runner precisely because countless millions have formed a similar opinion. It is, I now think, mistaken.

As a journalist, I harbor serious doubt about each of the most likely nominees. But with Sens. Hillary Clinton and John McCain, I feel that I’m dealing with known quantities. They’ve been in the public arena for years; their views, values and temperaments have received enormous scrutiny. By contrast, newcomer Obama is largely a stage presence defined mostly by his powerful rhetoric. The trouble, at least for me, is the huge and deceptive gap between his captivating oratory and his actual views.

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Repudiating racism is not a magic cure-all for the nation’s ills. The task requires independent ideas, and Obama has few. If you examine his agenda, it is completely ordinary, highly partisan, not candid and mostly unresponsive to many pressing national problems.

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Political candidates routinely indulge in exaggeration, pandering, inconsistency and self-serving obscuration. Clinton and McCain do. The reason for holding Obama to a higher standard is that it’s his standard and also his campaign’s central theme. He has run on the vague promise of “change,” but on issue after issue — immigration, the economy, global warming — he has offered boilerplate policies that evade the underlying causes of the stalemates. These issues remain contentious because they involve real conflicts or differences of opinion.

The contrast between his broad rhetoric and his narrow agenda is stark, and yet the media — preoccupied with the political “horse race” — have treated his invocation of “change” as a serious idea rather than a shallow campaign slogan. He seems to have hypnotized much of the media and the public with his eloquence and the symbolism of his life story. The result is a mass delusion that Obama is forthrightly engaging the nation’s major problems when, so far, he isn’t.

We need to debate the legality less and the morality more.

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Over at Protein Wisdom Darleen Click makes a very important point in reference to the waterboarding debate–”We need to debate the legality less and the morality more.” She writes:

I’m coming to the point where I do not care if waterboarding is “illegal” or not. If waterboarding is the correct moral action, I want people in that situation to be courageous enough to proceed whether or not they have “authorization.”

Let me further illustrate by using a real case that happened in Germany some years back.

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How much has our society, in letting legality become a substitute for morality, put itself in the position that we have these endless debates about waterboarding? It should not matter whether or not it is illegal when the moral context is so compelling that to not use the technique is to let a greater evil triumph. And that context should be part of any review of the action by superiors. There a some things that the law cannot be crafted to cover. There are some scenarios we cannot fully anticipate.

We need to debate the legality less and the morality more.

I wholeheartedly concur. Just because something is legal does not make it moral. And just because something is illegal does not make it immoral.  We do need to consider the morality of our laws more, and not just about waterboarding.

What To Eat

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Michael Pollan, the author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma and In Defense of Food, has written some quick advice for deciding what to eat.

I try to distill this cultural wisdom into a series of eating algorithms–mental tools for navigating the food landscape and eating well. Instead of talking about how to get your antioxidants or probiotics, my rules of thumb go more like this:

  1. Don’t eat anything your great-grandmother wouldn’t recognize as food.
  2. Avoid food products with more than five ingredients; with ingredients you can’t pronounce.
  3. Don’t eat anything that won’t eventually rot.
  4. Shop the perimeter of the supermarket, where the food is least processed.
  5. Avoid food products that make health claims.
  6. Eat meals and eat them only at tables. (And no, a desk is not a table.)
  7. Eat only until you’re 4/5 full. (An ancient Japanese injunction.)
  8. Pay more, eat less.
  9. Diversify your diet and eat wild foods when you can.
  10. Eat slowly, with other people whenever possible, and always with pleasure.

There are more, but this should give you some idea of how I approach the question of what and how to eat.

That sounds like good advice.

The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn

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Depleted Cranium has good list of  the The Top Ten Things Environmentalists Need to Learn

Here’s the actual list without explanations:

10. Go after pollution sources with the highest benefit/cost ratio, not those which are most noticeable

9. It is always best and often vital to utilize existing infrastructure and capabilities when implementing new methods or technologies.

8. “Natural” “Organic” and “Bio” do not mean “good.”

 7. Plans for the future should not be made on the most optimistic predictions and should consider the most pessimistic reasonable predictions

6. Simply attacking an environmentally damaging activity is not effective unless a better alternative of similar or better economics and usefulness is presented.

5. Taxation, price increases and caps on energy are inherently regressive and cause great damage.

4. It is unreasonable to expect the general public will accept major reductions in living standards or comfort and convenience. Simply put, it won’t happen.

3. Depending on continuous heavy subsidies is not sustainable.

2. Every little bit does not help.

1. Sacrificing the needs of an economy for the environment will destroy both.

In Honor of Spring Training…

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Now that pitchers and catchers are reporting for Spring Training, here’s the list of the 23 ways to get on base:

1. walk
2. intentional walk
3. hit by pitch
4. dropped 3rd strike
5. failure to deliver pitch in 20 seconds
6. catcher interference
7. fielder interference
8. spectator interference
9. fan obstruction
10. fair ball hits ump
11. fair ball hits runner
12. fielder obstructs runner
13. pinch-runner
14. fielder’s choice
15. force out at another base
16. preceding runner put-out allows batter to reach first
17. sac bunt fails to advance runner
18. sacrifice fly dropped
19. runner called out on appeal
20. error
21. four illegal pitches
22. single
23. game suspended with runner on first, that player is traded prior to the makeup;
new player is allowed to take his place