Jim

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN Published: March 27, 2005 How will future historians explain it? How will they possibly explain why President George W. Bush decided to ignore the energy crisis staring us in the face and chose instead to spend all his electoral capital on a futile effort to undo the New Deal, by partially privatizing Social Security? We are, quite simply, witnessing one of the greatest examples of misplaced priorities in the history of the U.S. presidency. "Ah, Friedman, but you overstate the case." No, I understate it. Look at the opportunities our country is missing - and the risks we are assuming - by having a president and vice president who refuse to lift a finger to put together a "geo-green" strategy that would marry geopolitics, energy policy and environmentalism. By doing nothing to lower U.S. oil consumption, we are financing both sides in the war on terrorism and strengthening the worst governments in the world. That is, we are financing the U.S. military with our tax dollars and we are financing the jihadists - and the Saudi, Sudanese and Iranian mosques and charities that support them - through our gasoline purchases. The oil boom is also entrenching the autocrats in Russia and Venezuela, which is becoming Castro's Cuba with oil. By doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are also setting up a global competition with China for energy resources, including right on our doorstep in Canada and Venezuela. Don't kid yourself: China's foreign policy today is very simple - holding on to Taiwan and looking for oil. Finally, by doing nothing to reduce U.S. oil consumption we are only hastening the climate change crisis, and the Bush officials who scoff at the science around this should hang their heads in shame. And it is only going to get worse the longer we do nothing. Wired magazine did an excellent piece in its April issue about hybrid cars, which get 40 to 50 miles to the gallon with very low emissions. One paragraph jumped out at me: "Right now, there are about 800 million cars in active use. By 2050, as cars become ubiquitous in China and India, it'll be 3.25 billion. That increase represents ... an almost unimaginable threat to our environment. Quadruple the cars means quadruple the carbon dioxide emissions - unless cleaner, less gas-hungry vehicles become the norm." All the elements of what I like to call a geo-green strategy are known: We need a gasoline tax that would keep pump prices fixed at $4 a gallon, even if crude oil prices go down. At $4 a gallon (premium gasoline averages about $6 a gallon in Europe), we could change the car-buying habits of a large segment of the U.S. public, which would make it profitable for the car companies to convert more of their fleets to hybrid or ethanol engines, which over time could sharply reduce our oil consumption. We need to start building nuclear power plants again. The new nuclear technology is safer and cleaner than ever. "The risks of climate change by continuing to rely on hydrocarbons are much greater than the risks of nuclear power," said Peter Schwartz, chairman of Global Business Network, a leading energy and strategy consulting firm. "Climate change is real and it poses a civilizational threat that [could] transform the carrying capacity of the entire planet." And we need some kind of carbon tax that would move more industries from coal to wind, hydro and solar power, or other, cleaner fuels. The revenue from these taxes would go to pay down the deficit and the reduction in oil imports would help to strengthen the dollar and defuse competition for energy with China. It's smart geopolitics. It's smart fiscal policy. It is smart climate policy. Most of all - it's smart politics! Even evangelicals are speaking out about our need to protect God's green earth. "The Republican Party is much greener than George Bush or Dick Cheney," remarked Mr. Schwartz. "There is now a near convergence of support on the environmental issue. Look at how popular [Arnold] Schwarzenegger, a green Republican, is becoming because of what he has done on the environment in California." Imagine if George Bush declared that he was getting rid of his limousine for an armor-plated Ford Escape hybrid, adopting a geo-green strategy and building an alliance of neocons, evangelicals and greens to sustain it. His popularity at home - and abroad - would soar. The country is dying to be led on this. Instead, he prefers to squander his personal energy trying to take apart the New Deal and throwing red meat to right-to-life fanatics. What a waste of a presidency. How will future historians explain it?

Safety Last! by Harold Lloyd 1923.

And won an Oscar for "Marty". Quite the different character.

You mean like the Wild Sky Wilderness, killed by a New Jersey Congressman despite the overwhelming approval of Washington state? Here's a news flash - ANWR is federal land, owned by all the US public, not just Alaskans.

It's done, passed by the Senate. This administration is leaving us quite the short-sited legacy on a number of fronts.

I do a lot of driving in the boonies for work on Forest Circus roads and such, and a truck is the word there. Thank god for winches too. Some of the smaller trucks get decent milage too, and if you're trying to get a few sheets of plywood home it's not going to happen in the Subie. On the other side, how many times do you really need one of the monster SUVs? My beef isn't on the small truck folks who actually use the vechile as a truck, needing some clearance or carting work stuff around. But Americans have swallowed the SUV image thing hook, line and sinker. How many of those folks driving the Yukons, Excursions, etc. ever get mud on their feet. It's amazing that Becky actually got on a route with out even an Eddie Bauer edition Blazer isn't it. Bottom line is that for 99% of the climbs, skis, and mt. bike rides in and around the Cascades theirs no need for a SUV. But it is quite manley. Whatever.

As if these are the only choices? Those opposed to ANWR drilling, including myself, point to the lack of any overall stradegy. Mandating higher fuel standards and funding alternative fuels technology and research will, in a relatively short time-frame, provide benefits well beyond mucking around in ANWR. And yes, you can blame this on Bush and his oil croanies. Their secret energy plan from the start was to provide more drilling opportunities for their oil buddies, stripping or ignoring environmental regulations for energy extraction. Check out what has been happening in the front range of the Rockies and in the Powder River Basin in Wyoming. Just as the Bushies' myoptic focus on drilling lacks logic, so does the argument that there are only two avenues regarding energy policy, more extraction and war.

Talk about tooth faries.

Best bet is a transmission specialist. There is one just north of PCC on Aurora, east side of the street. They rebuilt my old subaru tranny - seemed like fair folks. Sorry, can't remember the name.

This is just lame-o. What this country needs is an energy strategy worthy of the enormous energy-related problems it faces: global warming, soaring energy costs and dependency on Middle East oil among them. Opening up the coastal plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drill for oil and gas is not such a strategy. Yet that is the road the Bush administration is headed down once again. At the administration's request, Senate Republicans have put a drilling provision into a budget resolution that could be voted on this week. Since budget resolutions can't be filibustered, Republicans need only a simple majority, 51 votes, to open up a wilderness that has been off limits to commercial exploitation since the Carter administration. That tactic has not worked in the past. The Republicans came close in 1995, passing a budget with a drilling provision in it that President Bill Clinton vetoed, precipitating a government shutdown. They think they have the votes again this year, and this time they have a president only too eager to sign it. In recent weeks, the administration has mounted a full-court press. Gale Norton, the interior secretary, and Samuel Bodman, the new energy secretary, recently toured the refuge with newer members of Congress, whose votes could be decisive. In addition to the familiar economic arguments - that the refuge is America's last great untapped source of domestic oil and is crucial to its competitiveness - Ms. Norton emphasized one other line of thought, which she spelled out yesterday in an Op-Ed article in The Times. It is that drilling technology has advanced to the point where we are capable of extracting billions of barrels of oil without harming the refuge's fragile ecology or abundant wildlife. Environmentalists beg to disagree. Where Ms. Norton sees undisturbed tundra, they see hundreds of miles of pipelines, roads and drilling platforms, which would fragment wildlife habitats and corrupt a wilderness that, according to recent polls, a majority of Americans wish to leave undisturbed. We have expressed such reservations ourselves. But what troubles us most about President Bush's fixation on drilling is what it says about the shallowness of his energy policy. The numbers tell the story. The United States Geological Survey's best guess is that even at today's record-high prices - in excess of $50 a barrel - just under 7 billion barrels could profitably be brought to market. That's less than the 7.3 billion barrels this country now consumes in a year. At peak production - about 1 million barrels a day in 2020 or 2025 - the refuge would supply less than 4 percent of the country's projected daily needs. Any number of modest efficiencies could achieve the same result without threatening the refuge. Simply closing the so-called S.U.V. loophole - making light trucks as efficient over all as ordinary cars - would save a million barrels a day. Increasing fuel-economy standards for cars by about 50 percent, to 40 miles per gallon, a perfectly reasonable expectation, would save 2.5 million barrels a day. And bipartisan commissions have offered even bigger ideas: tax credits to help automakers produce a whole new generation of fuel-efficient cars, for instance, or an aggressive biofuels program that would seek to replace one-quarter of the gasoline we use for cars with substitutes from agricultural products. These programs would yield benefits - less dependency on foreign sources, a decrease in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere - long after the last drop of oil had been extracted from the refuge. Mr. Bush mentioned some of these ideas in a speech last week, but only in passing. His main emphasis was not on reducing demand, but on increasing supply by opening the refuge. That is where this administration has been ever since Dick Cheney's energy report of 2001. It was the wrong place to be then, and it is the wrong place now.

I was down there last year at that time, unfortunately the only time my wife, a teacher, had off. Luckily it did rain a bit, otherwise there is a huge dust cloud over Moab. I was staying out at Castle Valley and away from the fray. The amount and variety of off road vehicles was stunning when we went near town or near the slickrock area. Bands of vehicles would line up along the roads in and around Moab before taking off for the day. I must say they did some very impressive driving on steep rock that I would never consider, and I do a fair amount for work. Best thing you can do is don't go during that week. Second might be to concentrate on areas away from the most popular, wide jeep trails. And third would be to go down to the needles district of Arches. Good luck.

Hey - I know this guy!! http://www.cnn.com/2005/TRAVEL/DESTINATIONS/03/07/guiding.standards/

Source? Seems similar to the micro cracks in cams myth. No- I had read this one in one of the climbing rags a few years back. Some of the ropes tested were over 5 yrs old but had been kept out of UV range. These failed on the first UIAA drop test.

The way it was explained to me by THS at the Salt Lake City airport was that if the stove was ever used it still has traces of fuel, therefore not allowed on a plane. That said, I've put mine on checked luggage since then and so far so good. They took a fuel bottle of mine, with the pump, in SLC. I lied and said I had borrowed a stove and did not have mine in the luggage. Seems stupid.

Manfred Mann's Earth Band cover of "Blinded by the Light" whew that smells funny.

I thought the Elfin Hut had access to some good terrain. Don't know what the snow depth is this year, however.

Unfortunately there are some on either side of the aisle that have the "cut off the nose to spite the face" mentality. Even if said tounge-in-cheek such public sentiments cast a long shadow on any other rationale discussion.

Would the results you refer to include Syria's assassination of Lebanon's most powerful opposition leader last week?

Sat morning at the climbing gym then woodworking. Chilly Hill bike tour on Sunday with 2 friends and 4,998 folks I didn't know. Finished in just under two hours despine the throng at the ferry unloading. Someone's lost pair of goats ran with the peloton for about a mile before being nabbed by the police. Then drank beer in the sun at the George and Dragon.

In 1998, researchers at Emory University examined fatal and nonfatal shootings in and around homes in Memphis, Seattle, and Galveston. For every time a gun in the home was used to shoot an intruder, the researchers recorded four unintended shootings, seven criminal assaults or homicides, and 11 attempted or completed suicides. Other findings suggest that having a gun in the house nearly triples the risk that someone in the family will be killed with a gun. The risk of suicide is particularly high among gun owners. In a 1999 study in The New England Journal of Medicine, Garen Wintemute, MD, MPH, and his colleagues at the University of California, Davis, found that during the first year after the purchase of a handgun, suicide was the leading cause of death among the purchasers—accounting for 24.5% of all deaths and an astonishing 51.9% of deaths among women aged 21 to 44. During the first week after the purchase of a handgun, the rate of suicide by means of a gun among the purchasers was 57 times as high as the adjusted rate in the general population. What’s more, handgun purchasers remained at increased risk for suicide by firearm over the study period of six years. I read an interesting article in the NY Times the other day. Researchers (sorry don't have the link) determined that you are more likely to die a violent-related death in RURAL areas of the country compared to URBAN areas. The leading cause of violent death in both areas was gunshots. The difference was that in RURAL areas the primary method was suicide!!!

A friend of mine actually took an Icibana class for this reason. He was a hit with the over 60 crowd.

I can see a problem if one end gets dinked up and you have to cut off an end, then you're speical fit will not match the ski. Or if you need to use them on another pair of skis. I've never modified mine and they seem to work fine.

I'd rather read 30 of these than one hard-man cheast-beat. Rock on!!!

Ouch!! It's a good day when you return with all digits in tact. My nail has about grown back but it's still a bit sensitive and will always look a bit odd - but I'll take it considering the alternatives. Still not done with the dang project.

Though a bit pricey compared to the on-line places, I'd suggest going to Jock and Jill on Green Lake. The place is run by, well, runners. They can watch you run to determine your gait - pronate, supernate, neutral - if you don't already know, and can make suggestions for shoes.