Boston.com has more beautiful pictures of the Tour de France.
More pictures of the most beautiful sporting event on earth
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Monthly Archives: July 2008
The immorality of the housing bill
The housing bill that just passed Congress is a piece of immoral legislation. There are two reasons for this:
1. The bill bails out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. These are private corporations. When they were making tons of money, private investors made a killing. But one of the most important aspects of free markets is that companies who make bad bets need to be punished by the market for making bad bets or being reckless. And Fannie and Freddie were completely reckless. When times were good, they kept their profits. Now that their reckless has been exposed, they want the American people to bail them out.
This is wrong. The American people should be be forced to bail out private companies. Companies need to be help responsible for their actions and not have the American people bail them out when things go badly.
2. The bill bails out people who took out bad loans. Like Fannie and Freddie, a lot of people took out bad loans. In some cases, I’m sure people were misled by loan officers. But like like anything in life, if something is too good to be true, it almost surely is. Now President Bush and Congress want to protect some of these people from their bad decisions. This is backward. The way to keep people from being imprudent and taking imprudent loans is for people to be forced to deal with the downside risk (as well as being able to enjoy the upside benefit of making a lot of people in things go well).
This is wrong. The American people should not be forced to bail out people who took out imprudent loans. People need to held responsible for their actions and not have the American people bail them out when things go badly.
There’s one more problem with this bill–it probably won’t have much of an effect.
So let’s review–Congress and Bush come up with a law that protects some people from the results of their bad decisions. The bill currently has a $300 billion price tag. And according to some experts, it won’t have much of an effects. Great work guys! It must be an election year.
The greenest car is the one that’s already on the road…
A couple days ago I wrote a post about green buildings arguing that tearing down an existing building and building a new “green” building doesn’t necessarily save energy. One of the reasons is because constructing a new building takes a lot of energy, regardless of the construction materials used. This is also true with cars.
I read on the Wired blog yesterday about Ryan Mickle. A couple years ago, Mickle bought a Range Rover Sport. Now he lives in San Francisco and regrets his decision because he believes the SUV is environmentally irresponsible. He writes:
One Fewer SUV.
Since I moved back to San Francisco, I don’t need a car, so I want to take this SUV off the road for good. If I sold it, it’d just keep polluting with someone else behind the wheel. So I’m leaving what to do with it to everyone to help me decide.
…
Send me your ideas.
Should we blow it up? Drive it off a cliff? Convert it to a biodiesel or plug-in hybrid and give it to an organization that can use it to do something great? I’d expect that the best ideas will both be environmentally conscious and attention getting.
If Mickle is truly concerned about being environmentally conscious, he has a real problem. He says he wants to take the SUV off the road for good, but that’s almost certainly the most environmentally irresponsible thing to do.
A lot of energy goes into manufacturing a car. There are the obvious energy expenditures such as the power required to produce and transport the raw materials and the assemble and transport the car to a dealership. But there are unseen energy costs such as the energy that was required in the research and development of the car and the energy component of the administrative overhead for the auto company. All of this energy use adds up.
Mickle doesn’t want this car on the road because it only gets 13 mpg. That’s true, but throwing it away is wasting most of the energy that was used to manufacture the car. This is the point of reusing something–we reuse something because it is cheaper (or requires less energy) to reuse something rather than throw it away. A car is definintely not a single-use product.
It would be more environmentally conscious to give this car to someone who is going to buy a new car than destroying it. It might seem counter-intuitive, but people who want to “be green” need to think about all of the costs and benefits of their actions, not just one aspect (such as a car’s fuel economy).
Why does Al Gore exaggerate climate change?
I don’t understand Al Gore. Why does he continuously exaggerate his claims about man-made global warming? Why does he feel it is necessary to exaggerate?
Pat Micheals explains some of Gore’s recent exaggerations:
Gore: “Scientists . . . have warned that there is now a 75 percent chance that within five years the entire [North Polar] ice cap will completely disappear during the summer months.”
Fact: The Arctic Ocean was much warmer than it is now for several millennia after the end of the last ice age. We know this because there are trees buried in the tundra along what is now the arctic shore. Those trees can be dated using standard analytical techniques that have been around for decades. According to Glen MacDonald of UCLA, the trees show that July temperatures could have been 5-13°F warmer from 9,000 to about 3,000 years ago than they were in the mid-20th century. The arctic ice cap had to have disappeared in most summers, and yet the polar bear survived!
Gore: “Our weather sure is getting strange, isn’t it? There seem to be more tornadoes than in living memory. . . .”
Fact: The reason there “seems” to be more tornadoes is because of national coverage by Doppler radar, which can detect storms that were previously missed (not to mention that every backyard tornado winds up on YouTube nowadays). Naturally, the additions are weak ones that might, if lucky, tip over a cow. If there were a true increase in tornadoes, then we would see a definite upswing in severe ones, too. If anything, the historical record indicates a slight negative trend in the frequency of major tornadoes, based upon death statistics.
Gore: “ . . . longer droughts . . . ”
Hogwash. The U.S. drought history, given by the Palmer Drought Severity Index, is readily available and extends back to 1895. There’s not a shred of evidence for “longer droughts” in recent decades. The longest ones were in the 1930s and 1950s, decades before “global warming” became “the climate crisis.”
The greenest building is one that is already built…
Today green buildings are all the rage. For example, California’s Building Standards Commission recently changed the California Building Code so all new buildings have to be “green” in California. But when considering energy consumption, it is important to take a holistic view. First, if you are tearing down an old building to build a new new, the energy saving benefits might not be great. The Trust for National Preservation reports:
According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, commercial buildings constructed prior to 1920 have an average energy consumption of 80,127 BTUs per square foot. For the more efficient buildings built since 2000, that number is 79,703 BTUs. (The energy efficiency of buildings constructed between these years was less enviable—reaching around 100,000 BTUs—reflecting the cheap oil and electricity of the thermostat age.)
Something that compounds the lack of energy savings in a new green building is if employees have to travel farther to get to work. More from the Trust for National Preservation:
Sometimes, the energy costs are even less apparent. The Chesapeake Bay Foundation’s newly constructed Philip Merrill Environmental Center opened in late 2000, and the foundation notes that it “may be the world’s ‘greenest’ building.” Indeed, it was the first to earn a LEED platinum rating, and it’s been cleverly designed to reduce its environmental impact—with cork floors and cisterns and materials that are wholly recyclable. But as Environmental Building News recently noted, the new building was constructed 10 miles from the original headquarters in downtown Annapolis, Md., meaning that many of the 100 employees who once walked to work now drive. (The new building does feature facilities for bikes and kayaks to encourage self-propelled transport.) It’s uncertain whether the energy savings from the new building will offset the increased consumption from the commuting.
Frequently “being green” doesn’t help the environment. When considering energy savings we have to look at all the energy inputs and currently energy usage. This kind of thinking needs to be much more prevalent in the enviromental movement.
Why the Kyoto Protocol Failed
One of the many reasons the Kyoto Protocol failed has failed to reduce greenhouse gas emissions as much as promised is because the rules were poorly designed (you could argue they were set up to be gamed). The Wall Street Journal reports that a French companies will make about $1 billion dollars in greenhouse gas credits all because it made a $15 million dollar investment. Here’s the WSJ:
The company, Rhodia SA, manufactures hundreds of tons a day of adipic acid, an ingredient in nylon, at its factory here. But the real money is in what it doesn’t make. The payday, which could amount to more than $1 billion over seven years, comes from destroying nitrous oxide, or laughing gas, an unwanted byproduct and potent greenhouse gas. It’s Rhodia’s single most profitable business world-wide. Last year, destroying nitrous oxide here and at a similar plant in Brazil generated €189 million ($300.5 million) in sales of pollution “credits.” […] The Rhodia factory in [South Korea] alone is slated to bring in more money, under the U.N.-administered program, than all the clean-air projects currently registered on the continent of Africa.
This doesn’t make any rational sense, but that’s not the point, is it?
America’s Best Hope at the Tour de France
Here’s a good article about American Christian Vande Velde. Vande Velde seems like a good guy. He nearly quit bike racing and now he is less than a minute from the Yellow Jersey at the Tour de France. If he has a good day today and tomorrow he stands are decent chance of winning.
Update: Vande Velde finished 2:30 seconds back today. He is now in 6th place overall, 3:15 behind the leaders. It will take a very special effort for him to come back.
Environmentalists are a bit hyperbolic
The LA Times reports an amazing quote that is all too common from environmentalists. Here it is:
“Growing coal use threatens nothing less than the end of civilization as we know it,” said Henry Henderson, the Chicago-based Midwest director of the Natural Resources Defense Council.”
I’m sorry, there is no reason to believe that burning coal will end civilization as we know it. The worst case scenario is a hotter world with higher seas. That will not end civilization. What will end civilization as we know it is less energy. But that’s what exactly what environmentalists want.
The Forgotten Man, or why I’m a classical liberal
One of the things that frustrate me about politics is that politicians seldom discuss what William Graham Sumner called the Forgotten Man. Here’s how he explains it:
As soon as A observes something which seems to him to be wrong, from which X is suffering, A talks it over with B, and A and B then propose to get a law passed to remedy the evil and help X. Their law always proposes to determine what C shall do for X or, in the better case, what A, B and C shall do for X. As for A and B, who get a law to make themselves do for X what they are willing to do for him, we have nothing to say except that they might better have done it without any law, ‘but what I want to do is to look up C. I want to show you what manner of man he is. I call him the Forgotten Man.
It is morally wrong for A and B to force C to help X. If A and B want to help X, there is nothing stopping them. But in politics that is never discussed. All that is discussed is helping X. For example, we hear about how we need to help Fannie Mae and Freddy Mac to help people how took our bad loads. We don’t hear about the burdens we are placing on the rest of society who didn’t take out bad loans.
What have the planners done to Washington, DC?
City planners have long tried to make cities “better.” Sadly many of their efforts made cities worse in my opinion. In the past, cities generally grew up as organic places, mixing business and housing. But city planners thought they could do better. City planner segregates housing and business and generally tried to remake cities in to match their vision. Segregating business and housing made cities soulless and far less interesting.
Below are two pictures of the same street corner in Washington, DC–Check out these two pictures. The top picture is 8th and H, NW circa 1920 and I shot the bottom picture today.
(Click on the pictures for larger versions) DC circa 1920 was far more interesting than it is today. DC looked like an interesting city and today it looks sterile.
I’m not sure of all of the factors that lead to DC becoming a sterile city, but I’m sure one big factor was the city planners.
Today’s planners believe that we should no longer segregate uses. But today’s city planners hate cars. It’s ironic that in 1920, 8th street was far wider than it is today.
I should note that the top picture is from Shorpy.com. Shorpy.com is a photo blog of old time photos. It is very interesting to look and the picture and see how things have changed over time.