Biofuels: "Worse than we thought"

The word has been trickling out that the latest attempt by big energy to jump on the green bandwagon is, in fact, an environmental disaster.

Via Kevin Drum, biofuels guru Mike O'Hare says recent studies have shown that, once you take all the factors into account, corn-based ethanol and similar fuels actually dump much more CO2 into the environment.

There is now more than good reason to expect that no biofuel from seeds, possibly none (even cellulosic) grown on land that could grow food, will reduce global warming if substituted for petroleum products...

(There's more...)

The first piece of the puzzle is the recognition that if a piece of forest is cut down, or natural grassland plowed up, to grow biofuel, decay and/or burning of what was there before releases an enormous puff of carbon into the atmosphere that needs to be counted along with the carbon releases of the biofuel crop. Even spreading the initial release over decades of biofuel growing, it is large enough to push almost any biofuel's global warming intensity way above that of gasoline, especially because it all occurs right at the beginning of the future rather than a few years or decades down the line...

Small amounts of diesel and ethanol will probably be available from trash and agricultural waste like the tree branches and bark scraps the logging industry leaves around to decay, or cornstalks, or McDonald's used frying oil, and these are environmentally OK because they don't induce land use conversion....And many smart folks in this business expect that algae growing in tanks in the desert (for example) can eventually be taught to make a lot of diesel cheap, with no land use implications. But for now, and for a while, biofuels generally are going over a very rough patch of road, a patch that may go on for years before new technologies smooths it out again.

Sounds Strange Department

"If music be the food of love... veg on!"
Why not a vegetable orchestra?

Onigiri

More good eats from Lyra's blog. We served these up at our Oscar-nominated film marathon and potluck over the weekend.

Writers Strike: The End

It looks like the writers strike is over. Niki Fink reports (extensively!) at DeadlineHollywood:

At the WGA's news conference today, union leaders declared the new contract is "a huge victory for us". Trumpeted WGAW President Patric Verrone, "This is the first time we actually got a better deal in a new media than previously." Verrone credited News Corp. No. 2 Peter Chernin and Disney chief Bob Iger, and also CBS boss Les Moonves, with "being instrumental in making this deal happen" after the WGA spent 3 months "getting nowhere" with the AMPTP negotiators and lawyers. WGA negotiating committee chief John Bowman added that, "What happened to the Golden Globes was instrumental in getting the CEOs to this table. It was a huge symbol." Bowman said it was "imperative" that the WGA "get in on the ground floor of New Media. Henceforth, we're in from the start. It's 2% of distributor's gross. They can't have a business model without taking that into account."

(There's more...)

Verrone said, "Since we began negotiations in July, we've been saying, 'If they get paid, we get paid.' This contract makes that a reality. It's the best deal this Guild has bargained for in 30 years after the most successful strike this Guild has waged in 35 years. It was arguably the most successful strike in the American labor movement in a decade, clearly the most important of this young century. It is not all that we hoped for, and not all that we deserved. But as I told our members, this strike was about the future, and this deal assures for us and for future generations of writers a share in the future..."

Verrone said it was "heartbreaking for me personally" to drop the WGA's demands relating to reality and animation (Verrone is an animation writer) "But it was more important that we make a deal that benefitted the membership and the town as a whole and got people back to work." Verrone stated that "The legacy of the '88 strike was the ability of the companies to develop content without writers and creators. The legacy of this strike will be the ability of writers and creators to develop content without the companies. We are making deals, and we will continue to make deals, with Google, Yahoo, and others beyond just the 7 conglomerates."

People Power

More cool toys...

First, it was the flashlight you charged up by shaking it a few times. Never again to frantically search for batteries by candlelight when the power goes out...

Now, scientists at Vancouver's Simon Fraser University are developing a knee-brace that charges up electronics as you walk.

Max Donelan's team's work has spawned a startup called Bionic Power, which has received seed investment but no rounds of venture capital. Donelan told Wired.com that their initial markets were "people whose lives depend on portable power." These off-grid power users include backwoods hikers and the military, which is always looking for ways to reduce energy usage. Donelan called soldier battery use "astonishing," noting that soldiers can pack 30 pounds of batteries for a 24-hour mission. All those batteries add up to an equally astonishing $57,000 per soldier per year in battery costs.

They've got a video up explaining the core technology... worth checking out.

(Image courtesy Simon Fraser University)

No, He Can't

Parody is the sincerest form of mockery...

No more Polaroids

Technology marches on.

Polaroid instant photography was the coolest thing, back in the day... No waiting!

But now we live in an even more instant age, and I can take better pictures with my phone.

So... Polaroid has announced that it will no longer be manufacturing film. They dropped their instant camera manufacturing last year. Sensibly, they'll be focusing on digital photography.

Cupcakes Can Be Healthy, Too

More gluten-free goodness from Lyra.

Not only did she make these chocolate chip cupcakes gluten-free, but she used coconut milk instead of butter or oil. My god, they are rich and tasty....

Experience vs Inspiration

For years, the Democratic Party has nominated good, experienced candidates - who failed to inspire.

Mondale: Strong on substance, wooden in inspiration
Dukakis: Strong on substance, wooden
Clinton: Yes! Inspiration!
Gore: Incredibly strong on substance, inspirational in real life, put in a lock-box by his consultants and mocked mercilessly by the media
Kerry: You get the picture.

Reagan got people to cross over and vote for him despite their disagreeing with him on policy. He inspired.

We know that on issue after issue, from abortion to economics to Iraq to torture, the majority of Americans actually agree with us.

Wouldn't it be nice for a change to nominate someone who inspires people to vote for the candidate they actually agree with?

(There's more...)

I've been pretty much an Edwards supporter since 2004. I still think the wrong guy was at the head of the ticket that year.

With Edwards out, I've had to take a good look at the remaining choices. And it seems to come down to a choice: Experience vs Inspiration. "Ready on Day 1" vs "Yes We Can".

Now we have a choice between Clinton II, who we already know will not inspire the opposition to cross the line and vote for her.

And we have Obama.

Substance? The man is a sitting US Senator who, before being elected to public office was involved in grassroots community organizing. He's not the cypher some would like to make him out to be.

Governors have an executive advantage, of course. Bill Clinton was a governor who had put through policy initiatives in a small state. But it was not his policies and initiatives that made him Presidential timber, but his inspirational ability

Bill Richardson is out of the race, despite having a great resume, because he is not a great communicator.

You select a plumber based on "substance" because you know he's the guy with his hands on the pipes. You can choose a guy for CEO based as much on inspiration as on resume, because the CEO sets direction. For everything else, you have managers and bookkeepers.

It's the same with a President. We've seen time and again Democrats put forward proposals that are just and fair and far-reaching, only to have them shot down because we couldn't build a coalition of support behind it.

After years of nominating guys with good resumes who went down in flames in the general election, I'd like to see someone inspirational get the nomination.

"Nothing's Gonna Change My World"

What a great song. And what a wonderful idea...

NASA beams Beatles' song into space

The Beatles' song Across the Universe will be the first ever to be beamed directly into space next week, NASA said.

Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney said it was an "amazing" achievement and John Lennon's widow Yoko Ono called it the "beginning of a new age".

The transmission of the song over the space agency's Deep Space Network on Monday will mark the 40th anniversary of the day the band recorded the song.

The song will be aimed at the North Star, Polaris, 431 light years away from Earth, and it will travel across the universe at a speed of 186,000 miles per second, NASA said.

In a message to the space agency, Sir Paul said: "Amazing! Well done, NASA! Send my love to the aliens. All the best, Paul."

Car Culture and Cul de Sacs

James Howard Kunstler has been one of America's leading curmudgeons for the past 20 years. He was in Vancouver last week, spreading his iconoclastic (or perhaps "autonoclastic") notions that we are at the end of the era he calls "Happy Motoring" and entering the twighlight struggle of "The Long Emergency".

His weekly posts at Clusterfuck Nation are must-reads for anyone who is worried about the current state of America and the world - that is, anyone who has been paying attention.

What's scary about this interview is: It's from 13 years ago. And nothing has changed - the situation has only gotten more critical.

James Howard Kunstler and
The Geography of Nowhere.
Interview with Jeremy Bloom

"Eighty percent of everything ever built in America has been built in the last fifty years, and most of it is depressing, brutal, ugly, unhealthy, and spiritually degrading...."

Thus, James Howard ("Jimmy") Kunstler begins his new volume, "The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America's Man-made Landscape." A pithy, gutsy volume that pulls no punches, "Nowhere" develops the idea that the lack of community we feel in America today is, in large measure, because we have failed to build communities.

By looking at how our towns and cities grew - from Long Island to Detroit to Disneyland - Kunstler is doing more than the proverbial "talking about the weather" of our urban environment; he is attempting to do something about it. He points out what he thinks are the mistakes that were made, and also looks to the future with some hopeful changes, some of which are already in motion. It's an important issue: important enough that "The New York Times" has run reviews of "The Geography of Nowhere" in both the Book Review and the regular daily Times, as well as running an Op-ed Page piece by Kunstler.

We chatted with him on a warm summer day, sitting on the wide, carnival-painted porch of his Victorian Saratoga Springs house. Holding a glass of frosty iced tea in one hand, he contemplates the cover of "The Geography of Nowhere," with its pictured vista of Long Island's suburban sprawl.

J.H.K.: I wanted to call the book "Why America is So Fucking Ugly," but my publisher and I settled on "The Geography of Nowhere"

(There's more...)

JB: So we're nowhere, and it's ugly. How did we get here?

J.H.K.: We had an incredible imperial boom from to '50s to the '70s. The Interstate Highway System was going up, everyone was getting a new house with an FHA mortgage. People were making money off this stuff and the horizon seemed limitless. Very few people were thinking of the consequences - and particularly the unforseen repercussions, the hidden costs.

We have done incredible damage to our culture, to our spiritual life in this country, and our civic life. To any notion of the common good.

It boils down to this: we build too many places that are not worth caring about, and we've destroyed our civic life in the process. If we're going to continue to be a viable civilization, we're going to have to build places we can care about - and if we do that, we will enjoy civic life once again.

All these things may seem to be abstractions, but they are no more abstract than, for instance, the concept of justice - which is very important to Americans.

There are some ideals that we are going to have to pay attention to that are different from the ones we've been looking at over the last 20 years.

JB: But this is very abstract and complex: we're talking here of a juxtaposition of questions of natural law, aesthetics, as well as questions of efficiency and economics questions....

J.H.K.: Most people think of this problem only in terms of aesthetics. They drive down some gruesome commercial strip like Central Avenue in Albany, and they go "ewwww, yuck..."

JB: If they notice it at all.

J.H.K.: I think they notice it. And I think they are quite justified in feeling that way. But the outward appearance of our landscape is just a manifestation of deeper problems. And I wanted to find out what they are.

We once had a sense of a community as a functioning, living organism, made up of many other functioning, living things. It's places where people live, where people do business, where people enjoy public gatherings - all these places that used to comprise our civic life.

When we look at these gruesome highway strips and go "yuck" and "bleah,' and our stomachs turn, what it finally comes down to is an apprehension that we have thrown our civic life away, and that's what people feel.

JB: And do you blame the automobile for that loss?

J.H.K.: The automobile has played a very large part in that destructive process, but it's not the only thing. There have been some reviews of the book that have suggested that it is only about the effects of the automobile on the landscape, and that's not true.

(He pauses for a moment, takes a sip of ice tea, gathers his thoughts.)

The troubled townscapes and landscapes that we have created are manifestations of our economic predicament. We have come to the end of a 50-year-long, abnormal war-time boom economy. First it was the hot war economy, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam, and in between it was the Cold War economy.

From 1945 until the early 70's we could sell any product that we made to any country in the world, because after WWII all the advanced nations were either bankrupt or bombed into ruins.

Japan and Germany weren't going to try selling us cars in the 1950s. But then other countries started to catch up, and in the mid-'70s the Japanese started to successfully compete against our biggest industry: the car industry. Now, the industrial jobs that gave our workers the highest standard of living in the
world are simply gone, and they're not coming back.

So the economy we face in the next 50 years is not going to be the same as it was for the past 50. It is not going to be based on people driving around to the malls buying Guns and Roses posters and plastic trolls.

JB: But how was the "destruction of our civic life," as you put it, the consequence of that boom?

J.H.K.: Unintended consequences. One of the great tragedies of our times is that the great bustling middle class - that used to be out in the public realm fomenting ideas and meeting each other and being involved in cultural life - are the ones who abandoned the cities and are locked in their suburban houses.

The analogue to that is the way we have eliminated the merchant classes from our towns. This has been a great tragedy, because the merchants in small towns and in cities were the people who supported all the civic institutions. They were the people who sat on the library boards and on the school boards, and sponsored the little league teams. We threw them into the garbage cans so we could have K-Marts, where we could buy a microwave oven for $9 less than we would have been charged in a locally-owned store.

People are paying $9 less for their microwave oven, but they're losing a lot more than $9 in public amenity in the process.

JB: How did that happen?

J.H.K.: Mass merchandising in America came about because we have cheap transportation. Truckers pay less for gas in America than they do anywhere else in the world, period. As long as that's the case, you can have huge mass-merchandising corporations that can rationalize their operation. You can't do that in Italy, where gas is $4.50 a gallon and it costs $30 in tolls to drive
100 miles. You couldn't be trucking around 5 tons of trolls every day if the government didn't subsidize the highway system.

I'm not saying this was even avoidable. But what I think is really pathetic is the way people in the towns behaved contrary to their best interests. All the little Rotary Club boosters would do everything they could to get the K-Mart to come to town, and then they would stand there scratching their heads when all their fellow small-businessmen went out of business.

We see this in Saratoga. In 1974 they had a special supplement in the Sunday newspaper that was put together by the Rotary Club, the Chamber of Commerce, promoting the hell out of the new Pyramid Mall that was about to open here, and what a wonderful thing it was going to be, and what a wonderful adjunct to downtown Saratoga it was going to be. Well, 98 percent of the stores that existed in downtown Saratoga when the mall opened are gone now.

JB: In "The Geography of Nowhere," you take an in-depth look at the destruction of mass transit in this country, and the corollary that Detroit was given a chance to build smaller and more efficient cars when the oil embargo hit in 1973 with the oil embargo, and basically...

J.H.K.: They blew it.

JB: Or didn't see the possibility that things would change. We tend to look at the life we have, the economic environment we have as being inevitable, a "natural order"....

J.H.K.: Or maybe people are like fish, they don't question the water that they swim in. Our everyday environment is the water that we swim in.

JB: But in fact there were several economic choices that were made that could have gone a different way, with different results. For example, greater reliance on alternate fuels, or electric cars....

J.H.K.: Changing the fueling of the cars isn't going to help the trouble we have with the way places and people relate; it's only going to make the problems worse.

The question really isn't whether we're going to have solar cars, electric cars, propane cars - look, we're going to continue to have cars, I've been misquoted in some newspaper reviews as having said that the automobile is going to disappear; I never said anything of the kind. I do think we're going to have less automobiles in the future, and fewer people are going to be able to own them.

But to try to solve the problem by inventing a different kind of automobile is not going to happen, and it's not going to work, so we might as well forget it. We can get a lot more value out of redesigning the human habitat to get places that are worth living in, without having to redesign the automobile. No amount of redesigning the automobile will give us our civic life back.

JB: You comment in the book about Greenfield Villlage, Henry Ford's "old time Main Street U.S.A." park, and the fact that people visiting there like it very much, but can't quite put their fingers on why it feels good. Americans seem to instinctively like the old Main Street with its shops - and no parking lots full of cars - but somehow, it's not what we ended up with.

J.H.K.: People know what they like, know how to make a good town. The problem right now is that their instincts and their longings are in direct opposition to their building practices, laws and regulations.

JB: In the book, you talk about zoning as a prime villain....

J.H.K.: We invented zoning at the turn of the century, and it was a good idea - that all these factories and their noxious pollutants should go to their own part of the city and be dirty and smelly and noisy over there where they won't harm property values.

JB: Maybe this points a finger at one of the roots of our trouble: rather than deal with a problem, we've tended to just put it somewhere else and pretend it's not there. "Out of sight, out of mind;" put all the obnoxious activities where they'll bother someone else.

J.H.K.: And after WWII we decided that shopping was also an obnoxious activity and we weren't going to let people live around shopping either.

Zoning created the strip mall - which was an obnoxious place to shop. For 5,000 years people built their towns in a different way: You had stores on the first floor, and you had other activities up above; people living, offices, other activities all mixed together. That is the basic pattern for the basic American small town, and it's not a bad pattern. The ironic thing is, people wonder why small towns don't feel like small towns anymore - it's because their laws tell them they can't build them like small towns.

If you look around America, you will notice a curious thing: Every strip mall is one story high. We have an affordable housing crisis in this country, and one of the reasons for that is that we haven't been building any cheap housing for 50 years. We haven't been building any houses over stores.

The only kind of housing we've allowed people to build, for the most part are single family dwellings.

JB: But where did that idea come from, that it's "inhumane" to let people live over stores?

J.H.K.: I don't know. I do think it's funny that we think it's inhumane to allow people to live over a plant store. We also think its inhumane to have grocery stores in housing developments. I don't think I've ever seen a housing development in America that actually has a corner store right in the
development. And most of the people would probably greet the idea with loathing at first glance.

JB: But that makes sense - as you point out, the set-back requirements and lighting requirements would drop that corner store into the middle of a sea of asphalt and all-night mercury-vapor lighting; not exactly a pleasant neighbor.

J.H.K.: But you shouldn't have to have the mercury-vapor lights; you could even live without the parking lot. We have corner stores in the old neighborhoods in Saratoga, and they don't have parking lots, and they function very well, the people who operate them seem to be able to make a decent living. So it can be done. It's a matter of changing the zoning.

JB: In the book, you mentioned one strip mall in the Massachusetts town of Mashpee that had been converted into more of a "town center" sort of place....

J.H.K.: Yes. they took this one-story strip-mall with its sea of asphalt and built apartments on the second floor, took the parking lot and turned it into a street by putting stuff on the other side of it, and infilling it.

By observing a few good rules of urbanism, they took a place that looks like nowhere and turned it into a place that looks like somewhere.

JB: What rules are those?

J.H.K.: Well, for example, in order for a place to have any civic vitality, any life, it really helps if you have people living there. You go to a strip mall at night and it's a dead place; you go to a live downtown at night, like Saratoga, and there are people around. There are shops on the ground floor, they come out to the sidewalk - the rules are really simple. The trouble is they've been zoned out of existence, except in places that are essentially antiques.

JB: Like Woodstock, Vermont.

J.H.K.: Yeah, or any of the places I've mentioned in the book. You go to Georgetown (D.C.) and Beacon Hill (Boston), and people like to be in those places. They recognize the good relationships between things, instinctively. They know that they feel a sense of community there because they can see how nice it would be to be able to walk down that flight of stairs and out onto the street and buy a newspaper, and then go back for breakfast, or go down the street to a corner tavern and have a beer, or actually know the person that you are buying your meat from.

The other way of living is artificial, created by accident, by zoning and government policies, and as long as it's economically feasible for people to maintain this status quo, they are going to. My point is that it isn't going to be economically feasible much longer, because of the hidden costs.

Something that no one seems to think about: Every little town and hamlet in America has to bear the expense of operating a mass transit line that runs only twice a day, and only for people under 18. It's called "a school bus fleet." The costs of these things are immense - we're talking about millions of dollars for every small town in the country. And they sit around most of the day.

The tragic thing is, there's no reason on earth that they couldn't use some of those vehicles the rest of the day for public transport, but they don't. We need to rethink some of these "settled" issues. We're going to have to unsettle them, or we're never going to have decent towns in America.

When Robert Moses built his highway out to Jones Beach in the 1920s, he made the overpasses too short for busses to get under, because he didn't want that class of people coming out to Jones Beach. He wanted only the people who could afford cars - in short, he was a snob.

We do an interesting thing in this country. We pretend that we're the most egalitarian country on Earth. And yet, no other country segregates its people and its activities by category as rigidly as we do. People who make less than $12,000 must live in this concrete can we call public housing; We can't have any shopping or any places where people work around places where they live. So everything is disconnected.

That's not the way it used to be, when poor people lived right around the corner, or right upstairs, from middle-class people, when all the children walked to school together and played together.

We pay a lot of lip service to being a democracy, but when it comes down to the nuts and bolts of it, we really don't allow democracy to exist.

We don't want to live around people who are different. Forget racism - even white people don't want to live around white people who make less money than they do.

JB: One of the standard arguments against the kind of planning that you advocate is that "Americans won't stand for that kind of government interference in business and private property". But you seem to be saying that, in fact, most of the current situation is precisely because of government interference in business decisions, from zoning restrictions to FHA- subsidizing suburban tract-housing and government-subsidizing highways.


J.H.K.: Absolutely. And a few people have benefitted from, for instance, the government giving them insurance on their beach houses.

I had an interview with a very interesting man named John DeGrove, who is a professor at Florida Atlantic University and a major player in the revolutionary new land-planning stuff that's going on down there - They now have what is called a concurrency law, which requires the developers to do all the infrastructure work before they put in the development, so they can't just plop the houses down and then say to the county, "Okay, here's 7,000 new people, build schools for them." Now the developers have to do that, put in sewer lines, and do all the other things that were bankrupting municipalities. And as a consequence you don't have the same kind of development you had before.

The government has not only subsidized a lot of bad building, it has subsidized bad ideas about building.

JB: So, as long as there is still money to be made, what's going to change that?

J.H.K.: It's changing already. The Federal government is bankrupt. The chickens are coming home to roost now. We've out $500 billion from the savings and loan debacle; we're out several billion dollars from Hurricane Andrew, and that's probably just the first of many high-price disasters we're going to suffer in the decade ahead.

In an economy with less money sloshing around, it's not going to be possible to say "Go ahead, build your development on the beach, if anything goes wrong the government will pay for it again." So far we've postponed the reckoning by rolling over the debt. But we can't keep doing it forever.

JB: And yet you are not - despite what some critics have said - a "zero-growth" advocate either.

J.H.K.: The question is not whether we're going to have development or not - we're going to have it. But the development issues of the next decade are going to be different.

What we have been doing in America has been to take the functions of town life and smearing them all over the countryside. This has two consequences: It ruins the countryside, and it impairs and damages the life of our towns.

I think of development in a different way. A town is like an organism: it grows or it dies. The question is, HOW does it grow. Where does the development belong? And we're going to have to rethink that question.

The towns that people like best are the towns that are pedestrian-oriented, but we have built an infrastructure that will only serve motorists. When we discover that our life, based on motoring, is bankrupting us, we are going to build a different kind of environment.

Yes We Can

I've come around to Obama.

In part, this video is why. The man is an inspiration. And we need that in these times.