Gates on Defense

So apparently Bob Gates says that if we want to cut the Defense budget, we need to end the war in Afghanistan first.
Which seems logical.
However he suggests we do this around 2015, when we are "scheduled" to get out of Afghanistan.

TAE has a better solution: just pack up and leave, now. Right now. Right freaking now.

Remember when we fought in Vietnam for a decade, and then we left, and everyone was afraid communism was going to sweep across the globe, it was the most evil of all evils...and then communism didn't go anywhere, and it didn't spread across the globe?

Um, I don't have a PhD in anything, especially not geopolitics, but I have to wonder: if the U.S. of A. just walked out of Afghanistan today, and let the radical Islam (you know, that evil above all modern evils) have the country...would radical Islam sweep across the globe? Or would it stall, just like Communism, and never much threaten the U.S. again?


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Deep Thought

Could I set up my email so that when I send an email to an incorrect address and get an "address unknown" daemon email from my server, the address unknown email is autoforwarded to the incorrect address?

Would this cause a gravitational collapse and destroy the Earth?


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The "Let's Slash the EPA but Increase Defense Spending Plan"

President Obama's proposed budget released this week suggested a 13 percent cut in the EPA fund. A bold move amongst many to try to cut all the parts of the budget that he can without offending anyone who might scuttle his reelection campaign.

The House Republicans answered with their own proposal, suggesting 13 percent was a mere starting point, and went further, opening a 29 percent slash in the EPA budget.

Meahwhile, Obama suggested a 22 billion dollar increase in the Defense budget. The House Republicans only asked for a mere 11 billion dollar increase in the Defense budget.

Of course, protecting Americans is a priority. Right? Certainly a higher priority than protecting the environment in which Americans live. Because really, what good is the environment if we aren't free to enjoy it. We need to focus on our real priorities. Priorities like maintaining and expanding huge bases in other countries. Priorities like developing jet fighters we almost certainly will not use. Priorities like prosecuting endless wars. Priorities like maintaining a large and apocalyptically powerful nuclear arsenal which protects us from no one. Priorities like developing technologies to spy on Americans like never before. Priorities like spending more on our military than the next six largest countries combined. Priorities like maintaining a prison where suspected terrorists are held indefinitely without charges or trial.
These are the real priorities on which we should focus the next fiscal year. Certainly not things like subsidizing student loans for graduate students, maintaining our National Parks, or building wind and solar energy infrastructure.

In any case, the Obama budget refers to itself as the Path to Fiscal Sustainability. Like I said before: the environment will always take a backseat to the economy. Always.


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Climate Science vs. Climate Economics

Maybe you are getting tired of the climate ranting I'm doing. If so, here's David Roberts:

Or contemplate this: To reach even the more modest target of 450ppm, reports David Biello, the IEA says humanity would have to build the following every year between now and 2050:

... 35 coal-fired and 20 gas-fired power plants with carbon capture and storage; 30 nuclear power plants; 12,000 onshore wind turbines paired with 3,600 offshore ones; 45 geothermal power plants; 325 million square meters-worth of photovoltaics; and 55 solar-thermal power plants. That doesn't even include the need to build electric cars and hydrogen fuel cell vehicles in order to shift transportation away from burning gasoline.

He goes on, discussing the economic implications of that project:

From what economists tell us, it looks like the worst thing policymakers risk on climate change is somewhat slower economic growth. One way or another, we're getting wealthier.
This represents what is perhaps the foundational faith of modern economics: a faith in human adaptability and ingenuity. Especially via the distributed decisionmaking represented by open markets, humans can master almost any circumstances given time. (For a recent example of this optimism on Grist, see economist Matthew Kahn.)
Nowhere in these models will you find any hint of Diamond- or Lovelock-style apocalypse. Instead, future people will be much wealthier and, because of that, better able to cope with the problem.

Give the whole article a read. Basically, he writes a less depressing version of my thoughts here. The climate is finished, at least...the current climate. The climate will change, he argues, but humanity will adapt and change too. Our increased wealth will offset the increased costs of a less-hospitable world. Here's hoping, I guess.

One final thought. Roberts writes:

We are stumbling around in the dark, in an area where scientists tell us some very, very nasty beasties dwell. In that situation, it seems to me the overwhelming bias should be toward action -- getting lean, mean, and nimble enough to handle ourselves no matter what slouches our way.

 So if the politicians tell us there are very, very nasty beasties in the dark, we attack immediately, without hesitation and without proof of the beasties actually being there. But if scientists tell us of beasties in the dark...politicians demand more proof.


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The People Who Make Sustainability Impossible, Ctd

From an article on New Scientist:

The new cadre of Republicans in Congress is packed with climate change sceptics, several of whom have promised to use their power to cast doubt on the underlying science.

Seriously? "several of whom have promised to use their power to cast doubt." I don't know about you, readers, but I never voted for an elected official yet who had "the power to cast doubt" in their job description. The obvious implication here is that not only are the scientists who have provided evidence of anthropogenic global warming absolutely wrong, but also it is the imminent duty of the Republican Congresspersons to show that wrongness (and their own righteousness rightness, by extension).
It seems to me that (in a sane world) elected officials who doubted (with or without good reason) the credibility of some scientists or the veracity of their claims should respond by either asking for more information and/or providing funding in order to further explore the topic until a strong enough consensus has been formed (both among the scientists themselves as well as the community at large) that the elected officials can write and pass reasonable legislation which both follows the recommendations of the quorum, but also leaves itself open for adjustment, if later advances in science cause the topic to be modified.

And yet, here in the United States, the general consensus has been reached. The climate change scientists, with all the alacrity they could muster, have appealed to both the public as well as the government to enact legislation. But here we are: the Republicans in Congress apparently.

So I would stop here, and say "the people who make sustainability impossible are Republicans in the House." But that would be unfair. The simple truth is that I suggested above that legislation should follow both the recommendations of scientists but also the quorum of a free society. And a sickening trend in the last three years has been the rapid rise of climate change skeptics in America. This shudder-inducing set of polls from Gallup last year points to the problem: a growing number of Americans either don't believe in global warming, or they are pointedly apathetic. Still more disturbing: a rapidly growing number doubt the credibility of climate scientists.

How do you convince 150 million skeptical people that radical changes in their way of life are necessary in order to achieve global sustainability? You don't.


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The People Who Make Sustainability Impossible

So above is this great little video of Bill O'Reilly explaining that you can't explain things, and therefore God exists. Normally, I try to not to let these people get any blog time, but you know, based on the title of this post, that someone is going to get mentioned.
The really eerie thing about this isn't O'Reilly; his exhortations are easily enough dismissed. No, what scared me was when I showed this video to a friend and he immediately denounced the video, and O'Reilly, as "an entertainer just doing what he can to entertain." Further, when I suggested that all professions, engineering, plumbing, acting, entertaining, politicking, accounting, whatever-ing, are bound by ethics and morality, and that Mr. O'Reilly was lying to people - blatantly - he suggested, defensively, that "the global warming people" are liars too, and for the same reason as Mr. O'Reilly.
The problem here is that a sizable portion of the world population (especially in industrialized nations) don't just believe that anthropogenic climate change is an unproven myth. They believe it is a proven lie. They believe that "global warming" is a political tool that left-leaning politicians use to amalgamate power. They do not see clear evidence of climate change because the scale of it is not one that can be observed by an individual. Nor do they see the benefits of sustainable concepts: if Eastern Kansans have to pay higher taxes to finance wind generator installations in Western Kansas, all they see is the taxes, the wind generators are invisible, the cleaner energy produced by them is invisible, and the net reduction in greenhouse gas is invisible. The jobs created (or maintained) to install these generators are typically invisible too.
And yet, an unusually cold winter in Eastern Kansas is very visible. And so the pressing need to convert from a global economy built on the back of carbon into one built around hydrogen seems like no big rush; look how cold it was this year.
Given a population of people clearly skeptical about global warming, it doesn't take much to concrete in them the belief that global warming was cooked up as a method to steal their livelihood. (RUN ON SENTENCE WARNING!) Charges are leveled at environmentalists like Al Gore that he and others (in no particular order) have an obvious conflict of interest because they advocate green technology but also invest in it (which is anathema to people who of course never have invested in concept they also champion), they make erroneous scientific claims (that one group in England did...something wrong...right, so all global warming evidence must be suspect), they claim we need to be sustainable but hypocritically use large amounts of energy themselves and continue to eat meat (because if you contradict yourself at all in your entire life, then your entire life is a lie), and he and others refuse to debate the topic of global warming (sorry, but for most of the scientific community, i.e. anyone qualified to effectively debate the topic, anthropogenic global warming is not debateable, it is a fact).

And yet, we do not live in a meritocracy or a technocracy. We live in a world where Sarah Palin can be a candidate for Vice President. Where political positions aren't earned through promotions, it is earned through popularity contests. And so as long as loud voices can continue to drive the debate away from solutions to global warming and keep it focused on the question of whether global warming exists at all, the world cannot move forward. Sustainability goes nowhere.


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Quote for the Day

From Neal Stephenson at Slate:

"Moreover, the rocket industry's status as a colossal government-funded program with seemingly eternal lifespan has led to a situation in which its myriad contractors and suppliers are distributed over the largest possible number of congressional districts. Anyone who has witnessed Congress in action can well imagine the consequences of giving it control over a difficult scientific and technological program."

Double that up with this post on Lockheed-Martin from William Hartung at Guernica:

[C]onsider Lockheed Martin’s sheer size for a moment. After all, the company receives one of every 14 dollars doled out by the Pentagon. In fact, its government contracts, thought about another way, amount to a “Lockheed Martin tax” of $260 per taxpaying household in the United States, and no weapons contractor has more power or money to wield to defend its turf. It spent $12 million on congressional lobbying and campaign contributions in 2009 alone. Not surprisingly, it’s the top contributor to the incoming House Armed Services Committee chairman, Republican Howard P. “Buck” McKeon of California, giving more than $50,000 in the most recent election cycle. It also tops the list of donors to Sen. Daniel Inouye (D-HI), the powerful chair of the Senate Appropriations Committee, and the self-described “#1 earmarks guy in the U.S. Congress.”
Add to all that its one hundred and forty thousand employees and its claim to have facilities in 46 states, and the scale of its clout starts to become clearer. While the bulk of its influence-peddling activities may be perfectly legal, the company also has quite a track record when it comes to law-breaking: it ranks number one on the “contractor misconduct” database maintained by the Project on Government Oversight, a Washington-DC-based watchdog group.

Have a great day.


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