JayB

Yes.

Regressive alert at Der Spiegel! http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/0,1518,694263,00.html

Let's face it, beneath the smooth talking veneer you have never been much more than a knuckle-dragging red-baiter. I'll leave it to you to mount a passionate defense of Lysenkoism, comrade! Have at it. thank you for making my point, again. Ditto! Heaven forbid anyone should question the sacred legacy of that misunderstood genius, Trofim Lysenko, and the agricultural miracle that he spawned in the Soviet Union.

Do you think dead people care whether they were killed by a suicide bomb, machete, Colombian necktie, or a flaming tire around their neck? I'm looking forward to your paper where you identify the cultural gene hardwired into the American psyche that accounts for the increased number of suicide shootings in schools, workplaces, and fast-food restaurants by disaffected, young, white, suburban males. Its probably more instructive to worry about the impact that the murders by various means have on the living, which is what the killers are primarily concerned with. On that more salient point, then mode of murder matters quite a bit. The fanatics understand this quite clearly. Presumably you do too, which makes it all the more puzzling why you'd spend so much time and energy defending Islamist fanatics given that you purport to oppose everything that they stand for.

In other words, horrific violence directed against innocents is only worth investigating when it's directed against Westerners and creating a phantom menace serves the broader geopolitical goals. As far as the Muslims who just want to live in peace bearing the brunt of violence, we know well your record on supporting policies where "innocents" easily become "collateral damage". I'm not sure that the menace is particularly phantom-like to the folks on the wrong end of honor killings, forced clitorectomies, stonings, executions for witchcraft,disco-train-plane-bombings etc, etc, etc, etc but I appreciate how it can seem so from your vantage point. My take is that the cultural values in place prior to colonization, war, famine, economic stagnation, etc determine how a given people behave during and after these episodes. If Maronite and Coptic Christians -not to mention secularists - from the Middle East were detonating themselves near ice-cream trucks with a population adjusted frequency equal to that of their Muslim counterparts, you'd be justified in arguing that the set of creeds and values unique to Islam had no role in catalyzing and sustaining episodes like the campaign to murder a handful of Scandinavian cartoonists, train bombings, etc. Ditto for all of the other claims about poverty, repression, etc, etc, etc that don't square in the least with the profile of those committing the violence.

In short yes. You're obviously not familiar with what is going on in this country, even this state, regarding windpower. In CA and NV there are large scale (2,000 MW) projects going in, Scotland has leased tidal and wave projects with up to 200 MW per project, off shore wind is huge in the EU - and yes it's on a commercial scale, viable, and on the grid. Naysay on this and you're just uninformed dude. I'm aware of the existence of the projects - just not of any that were funded, continue to operate, etc without direct subsidies. I'm not raising these points because I dislike the idea of alternative energy. I think its great. I hope that the technology matures to the point where they generate enough free cash flow to be commercially viable on their own, and enough energy to keep the lights on everywhere tomorrow. They aren't. They won't be anytime soon. By all means keep funding R & D but I'm not down with the turning over the infrastructure necessary to keep civilization going to fantasy spawned by the energy equivalent of Trofim Lysenko. Can you provide some specifics? For instance, the Solar Millennium project in the CA mojave (which I'm working on) is going in right now. 200 MW - the only incentive they are getting is some good deal on BLM land leases (as all energy projects get including coal and oil) and the benefit of an accelerated depreciation. There is no money from the state or feds in it. You can point to the renewable energy goals of Or, WA, and CA among other states as altering the market I suppose - but the coal, oil, and gas industries get way more tax incentives and outright handouts than the peanuts provided to renewables. While the EU is nearing 10% of their capacity, right now, with stringent goals to get to 20% by 2020 - you're drowning in your theories again and ignoring reality. http://www.dsireusa.org/summarytables/index.cfm?ee=1&RE=1 We can chose the state and go from there. Without the mandates, there'd be no project for you to work on. I'd be more than happy to end all subsidies for all energy production tomorrow. How about you? If we're going to compare subsidies, is it more valid to compare gross subsidies, or subsidies that are normalized by output - e.g. subsidies per kilowatt hour. How about you post a table with that breakdown? As I said before, subsidies have to come from somewhere else. I'm not sure that the somewhere else in question - the US economy - spins out enough output to foot the bill. At least not if people want to eat. I'd be happy to add more about the real economy, but it's also worth asking how the political economy would work out. Once output per dollar goes out the window and it's purely a matter of Uncle Sugar picking winners, are you really confident that eco-virtue will be rewarded above all else. If that's the case, how do you explain the chart below? I'm excited about the potential of wind, solar, etc but I'm not confident that an orgy of rent-seeking conducted under a "Green Energy" banner is the best way to realize it. As far as Euroland goes, their only prayer is to increase the efficiency with which they translate energy consumption into GDP growth more rapidly than their generation costs increase. Between skyrocketing public debt and plummeting birth-rates, their capacity to subsidize loss-making energy ventures is limited and declining. Greece is just the beginning.

Let's face it, beneath the smooth talking veneer you have never been much more than a knuckle-dragging red-baiter. I'll leave it to you to mount a passionate defense of Lysenkoism, comrade! Have at it.

Yes. I also know about the Belgian colonial exercise in the Congo as told in "King Leopold's Ghost." Well over a century of unspeakable suffering - yet they have shown little inclination to respond by traveling abroad and detonating themselves in packed discos. Ditto for the Vietnamese, etc, etc, etc. The funny thing is that the people who have and will suffer the most at the hands of Muslim fanatics are...other Muslims who just want to live their lives in peace. Do you really think that hordes of Western leftists that go out of their way apologizing for, rationalizing, and desperately trying to unearth a tenable historico-political excuse for the fanatics' actions are actually helping anyone? Other than the fanatics.

Could be a much more important factor than the standard histories account for...

In short yes. You're obviously not familiar with what is going on in this country, even this state, regarding windpower. In CA and NV there are large scale (2,000 MW) projects going in, Scotland has leased tidal and wave projects with up to 200 MW per project, off shore wind is huge in the EU - and yes it's on a commercial scale, viable, and on the grid. Naysay on this and you're just uninformed dude. I'm aware of the existence of the projects - just not of any that were funded, continue to operate, etc without direct subsidies. I'm not raising these points because I dislike the idea of alternative energy. I think its great. I hope that the technology matures to the point where they generate enough free cash flow to be commercially viable on their own, and enough energy to keep the lights on everywhere tomorrow. They aren't. They won't be anytime soon. By all means keep funding R & D but I'm not down with the turning over the infrastructure necessary to keep civilization going to fantasy spawned by the energy equivalent of Trofim Lysenko.

The point is, and has always been, that there is nothing inherently more backward or more violent about Islam than there is about Christianity. Some of the positions you've taken on this topic, quotes from the Koran and the anecdote on the Barbary pirates above, etc, would suggest you don't hold with this view. The adoption or reactivation of religious extremism always occurs in political and socio-economic contexts (endogenous and exogenous). You want to work to reform Muslim societies in the grips of religious extremism? Fine, concentrate on the real world grievances that fuel these movements and support existing secular movements and alternatives within those countries (and not just the ones that support your geopolitical and ideological project). Blaming ancient texts for contemporary problems obfuscates real existing conditions and will continue to be counter-productive. I'd gladly agree that it's hard to tell which holy text would win a theological beauty contest. Having made that concession, at this stage in history text-parsing is kind of beside the point. It wasn't inevitable that Western civilization would pass through the renaissance and the enlightenment and that Islamic countries wouldn't - but that's the way things went down. The reality is that as a result of a chain of unfortunate accidents of history, the various institutional and cultural manifestations of Islam that have set the moral, cultural, and intellectual tone for majority Muslim populations around the world for the past century at least *are* the problem. Whatever the merits of Sufism, the Muslim world hasn't been dancing to its tune for quite some time. China, India, the Congo, Vietnam - there's dozens of states that have had colonial experiences that were at least as recent and brutal as anything that the vast majority of Muslims have had to contend with - yet they're not trying to detonate themselves in pre-schools. Then there's the fact that the vast majority of Muslim terrorists come from the most privileged strata of the Muslim population. Or Europe. None of these facts supports the arguments that a colonial legacy, material privation, or political repression on their own are sufficient to bring about the kind of murderous fanaticism that prompted this discussion. Who knows what will help them, but IMO there's not much the West can do for the liberal elements in the Muslim world other than championing, preserving, and defending the values, rights, and freedoms that are at odds with the Wahabi vision of the world in our own societies. I can't for the life of me figure out how imposing their religious taboos on ourselves is going to make life any easier for all of the people who are suffering under the weight of them in their own countries or communities.

This explains the prevalence of Congolese and Vietnamese chaps hot to detonate themselves on airliners.....

It's not a "reaction" as the support that Israel gave to Hamas during its early years to undermine Arafat and Fatah, exemplifies extremely well. "“Israel and Hamas may currently be locked in deadly combat, but, according to several current and former U.S. intelligence officials, beginning in the late 1970s, Tel Aviv gave direct and indirect financial aid to Hamas over a period of years. Israel ‘aided Hamas directly – the Israelis wanted to use it as a counterbalance to the PLO (Palestinian Liberation Organization),’ said Tony Cordesman, Middle East analyst for the Center for Strategic [and International] Studies. Israel’s support for Hamas ‘was a direct attempt to divide and dilute support for a strong, secular PLO by using a competing religious alternative,’ said a former senior CIA official.” Middle East analyst Ray Hanania concurs: “In addition to hoping to turn the Palestinian masses away from Arafat and the PLO, the Likud leadership believed they could achieve a workable alliance with Islamic, anti-Arafat forces that would also extend Israel’s control over the occupied territories.” http://original.antiwar.com/justin/2006/01/27/hamas-son-of-israel/ If the fanaticism in question were confined to West Bank and Gaza, you'd have yourself an argument worth pursuing here.

You are such a fraud. The only possible relevance of oil use per GDP unit is according to the use of energy to generate a unit of GDP. In the case of shuffling fake wealth from a computer to another, it requires little energy or at least much less than that required by the heavy industries that have gone to developing nations. Yes. That's what energy-intensiveness per unit GDP tells you. Why is lowering it a negative? Strange stance for a certified friend of the earth to take.

the "planet" cares about how much oil you use that you could avoid using. We have at least twice as far to go in this domain as any other nation among developed nations, thanks in part to your oil corporation shilling ways. Nah - I'm pretty sure that it's just total global consumption that matters, which is a direct function of wealth. The more output people generate, the more money people have to fund consumption, and the more they consume. The reason that Greeks don't use much energy isn't because of their superior virtue, it's because they don't generate enough output to buy as much. When you look at energy consumption per unit GDP, which is a much better proxy for efficiency than simple per-capita consumption metrics, the picture looks a bit different. Below is a plot of energy consumption per-unit-GDP.... Time for you to start hectoring the Norweigans and the Dutch.... I don't know about this one. We get a big boost from what? - Finance was 24% of GDP last year and we know where that led to - so we get extra points for the paper shuffling wall street types. Also - EU is way ahead of us in renewable energy production - 9% from wind, solar, and marine energy (wind,tidal, wave) with agressive mandates to reach 20% by 2020. They are way ahead of us in conservation and renewable energy production. And here's another way to look at it: So generating big chunks of our economic output sectors that don't require much energy to make what they sell, like software, entertainment, consulting services, etc is undesirable?

Well, it's kind of important to figure that out, don't you think? No doubt. But with the politics, and frankly ignorance, surrounding the topic of energy reform it's hard to get the conversation going in any reasonable manner. Why any political affiliation would want to extend our serfdom to Saudia Arabia is beyond me. The strong emphasis should be on mass transit, conservation and energy efficiency, and a push on renewable energy. It's not going to happen with just the private sector, it will take government vision and push. You do realize that we import like 2-3X as much oil from Canada/Mexico as we do from Saudi Arabia which counts for ~14% of our total imports? As things stand now are there any renewables that generate total outputs that are worth more than the total value of the inputs required to generate them? That is, that generate power that's worth more than it costs to generate it? Once the government stops taking money from some other sector of the economy and handing over to the folks operating these power plants at a loss, what happens to them? Would any of them remain in operation? If not, that means that the resources required to keep every alternative energy plant running have to come from somewhere else. Every time you expand their output, that "somewhere else" gets larger and larger. Any guess at the total annual cost to convert 100% of our power generation to wind-solar-etc relative to GDP? Unless energy efficiency increased at a level equal or greater to the increasing cost of power, you'd lower national output by an amount equal to the increased cost. Sounds innocuous enough until you translate that into concrete terms, which would be equivalent to a broad recession with the bulk of its impact concentrated on the people with the lowest income. Guess what happens to the Grandma in Fargo when her heating and cooling bills go up by $100 per month? As a lower wage employee, if production costs increase by more than the value of your hourly output, is it more likely that your wages will increase or decrease? Etc, etc, etc. The mass conversion to alternatives won't happen until they're competitive with conventional sources of power. The immediate economic cost of trying to force the country down that road before the technology is capable of meeting that benchmark is in hand is just going to be far too great.

the "planet" cares about how much oil you use that you could avoid using. We have at least twice as far to go in this domain as any other nation among developed nations, thanks in part to your oil corporation shilling ways. Nah - I'm pretty sure that it's just total global consumption that matters, which is a direct function of wealth. The more output people generate, the more money people have to fund consumption, and the more they consume. The reason that Greeks don't use much energy isn't because of their superior virtue, it's because they don't generate enough output to buy as much. When you look at energy consumption per unit GDP, which is a much better proxy for efficiency than simple per-capita consumption metrics, the picture looks a bit different. Below is a plot of energy consumption per-unit-GDP.... Time for you to start hectoring the Norweigans and the Dutch....

how is pointing the finger at the handy work of deregulators and oil industry shills like yourself "harping about how everyone else lives"? This is starting to resemble a post-scandal sermon in which Ted Haggard defends his right to condemn male escorts and meth binges...

So does the planet care if the petroleum gets sucked out to be burned in a Southern Televangelists V-12 powered, Bible-themed hot-rod or to power a danish performance artists conservation-themed LED installation?

Sure you're allowed to. And Other folks are allowed to ridicule you for it if your "support" is limited to harping about how everyone else lives.

Your hypocrisy knows no bound. it's people like you who want to make it solely a personal issue, whereas I have done the exact opposite. As far as personal responsibility is concerned I have called for energy conservation for literally decades, which your type has ridiculed like forever. Sorry kemosabe, but by calling everyone else out on their energy consumption you've made an issue of your own. Per your logic, if Tiger Woods had been a vocal advocate for chastity and fidelity, there'd be no grounds for anyone to criticize him for his philandering. As far as my own hypocrisy is concerned - lets take a look at that on this particular issue. Isn't hypocrisy practicing one thing while preaching another? In this case - I suppose I'm guilty of practicing something that reduces my oil consumption without preaching for others to do so. Guilty! No post up those personal consumption stats so that we can all collectively bask in the warm glow of your eco-sainthood.

isn't this just sort of snide backhanded name calling with bigger words? Yes - all the more reason to post up those annual BTU, Kilowatt-hour, and gallon consumption stats in order to silence the mockery from the regressive-warmongering-crypto-fascist-right-wingers in the peanut gallery.

Sure they're not closet-fixie riders angry that you're wearing a helmet and using gears, you yuppie poser?

the big difference is I know which fuckwits around here fight energy conservation tooth and nail, whereas you don't know jack about my footprint. Yet, it hasn't prevented you from telling me I was responsible for the policies YOU voted for. Now is your chance to put all of us those who have had the temerity to doubt the heroic magnitude of your personal sacrifices on behalf of the planet in our place. Post all of the details of your footprint here so that we can hail your eco-virtue with the proper amount of deference and rectitude.

I've been a bike or foot commuter for all but ~3.5 years since 1992, *and* I shill for the oil industry. Offshore drilling will increase for the indefinite future. Any suggestion to the contrary is a fantasy. Auto traffic accounts for ~35% of all transport related oil consumption, which is itself responsible for ~2/3rds of total oil consumption, or about ~23% of the total when all is said and done. Every single car in the US could vanish tomorrow and there'd still be sufficient global demand to drive more exploration and drilling. There's no realistic substitute for petroleum in the vast majority of applications that currently require it. The only question is which shores it occurs off of. I'd personally rather have it done off the shores of countries that aren't either run by a cadre of religious fanatics that will funnel the proceeds into jihad academies, or third world basket cases that haven't demonstrated the capacity to manage their sewage properly.