Category: Political

Several of the rural legislators in both parties who support municipal wireless for their districts and for the bandwidth-starved towns of rural Texas are among the group of sponsors of a clutch of bills proposing to increase the state’s renewable energy standard.
The website of Texas Impact (I love Google) explains the story behind the Texas renewable energy bills.

In 1999, then-Governor George W. Bush signed historic Texas legislation establishing the nation’s first “renewable power standard” or RPS. The law set goals for how much of Texans’ electricity would come from renewable sources like wind and solar power. Texas has the best potential for renewable energy of any state. The 1999 law set a modest goal of three percent by 2009, meaning that by 2009, three percent of Texas electricity would come from renewables.

Texas is likely to reach the 2009 standard this year. And rural Texas stands to gain from the jobs provided by increasing renewables, mostly wind power. So several legislators are proposing increasing the renewable targets:

• SB 533 by Sen. Fraser and HB1671 by Rep. Hunter: 5,880 MW by 2015 ( 4.2% of state total)
• SB 836 by Sen. Duncan and HB1798 by Rep. Swinford: 10,880 MW by 2015 ( 7.9% of state total)
• SB1075 by Sen. Zaffirini and HB 2692 by Rep. Gallego: 20% of state total by 2020

Environmental advocates, including Texas Impact and the Union of Concerned Scientists are encouraging Texas to seek the higher 20% standard, which will result in the greatest increase in jobs and decrease in contribution to global warming.
The Texas Renewable Energy Industry Association is seeking 10% by 2015 because of concerns about building transmission for the amount of power in the next decade.
Anybody with domain expertise is most welcome to comment on the merits of the different goals. Is it the case that more is better? Is there a practical limit with how fast we can move?
Increasing renewables isn’t just a tree-lover’s dream. It’s also one of the best things the US can to increase national security — what Friedman calls the geogreen strategy. The Wahhabi think tanks that fuel Islamic fanaticism are funded by the Saudi government, which we subsidize with our oil dollars. Just a little less profit margin to the Saudis, and they reduce their exports of terrorism.
It seems like basic supply and demand economics. Starting more mideast wars increases oil prices and increases the supply of anti-American zealots. Increasing consumption of renewable energy and using less oil reduces the supply of anti-American zealots. Plan B sounds better to me.
p.s.
According to a market research report released earler this month by Clean Edge, Inc. solar, wind, and fuel cells are poised to grow from a $12.9 billion industry today to $92 billion by 2013.
The total US energy market was $350 billion in 2002, so clean energy has a total market share of under 4% (not counting increases in oil prices). A better way to measure market share would be in units of energy consumption, not dollars, but CleanEdge doesn’t publish units.
According to the US Dep’t of Energy cited on this vendor’s page overall US energy consumption is growing at 2.2% a year. Taking out my trusty napkin, if you run CleanEdge’s 30% growth rate on units, the US gets to 35% market share by 2013, which is over the tipping point for the mainstreaming of new technology. But is it fast enough to save civilization from global warming?

Prescription for Change is a very funny take on a serious topic — drug companies are regulated before they release a drug, but they aren’t obligated to disclose nasty side effects after the drug is on the market.
The video features the Austin Lounge Lizards and Animation Farm of Austin. It was produced by my friend Kathy Mitchell of Consumer’s Union, the parent organization of Consumer Reports magazine.

This LA times article describes a three-way tie for LA mayor. The article describes the polls, the levels of ethnic support, the ads, the ad strategies (should they go negative?), and some scandal in the incumbent’s office.
Yet, the article says, “more than four in 10 likely voters say they do not know enough about Hertzberg [one of the challengers] to have a positive or negative impression of him.” The article doesn’t help in the slightest. It says little about the candidates’ backgrounds, positions, and beliefs. It says little about the incumbent’s achievements or lack thereof.
So, this article is about a poll, maybe that explains it. But a search on the name of one of the candidates reveals a similar lack of substance in other campaign stories. In one story, the candidates compete with rain. In another, they compete in the news with mudslides. The paper goes out of its way say that the candidates are less interesting than the weather.
Maybe elections in LA are purely tribal, maybe people are bored with the election, but the newspaper is part of the problem.

In which David Frum objects to gay marriage because it somehow abolishes

the idea that husbands and wives each have special duties to one another, and that a husband’s duties to his wife – while equally binding and equally supreme – are not the same as a wife’s duties to her husband.”

Frum’s statement is illogical because the “duties” that he is talking about — whatever they are — aren’t anywhere near the law. I am curious, and at the same me, very leery to know what he means by these things that he doesn’t mention out loud. Is it:
* a husband’s obligation under Jewish law to satisfy a wife sexually (true)
* a wife’s duty to have dinner ready and the table set by 7pm?
* a wife’s duty to submit humbly to corporal punishment?
I am not looking to the day when these duties are spelled out and somebody tries to put them into civil law.

Grits for Breakfast just won a Koufax award for best single-issue lefty blog, for its coverage of criminal justice reform in Texas. Scott Henson’s blog includes original research and insightful coverage of an important issue that is badly undercovered by the mainstream media.
The Koufax awards inspired others to share links of favorite niche blogs.
Meanwhile, Salon picked up the Daou Report, a compilation of thumbnail clips from political blogs, right and left. Skimming the Daou Report, I get a headache from the snippets of insults — “The Petulant Left”, “wingnuts plan to keep women scared”, back and forth like 4th grade recess.
Complaints about the dreck in the blogosphere are missing the point. There’s infinite space — anyone can choose to read good sources like Scott, easily find other good sources, and ignore the spitball fights.

At the urging of Aldon Hynes, I just got around to watching EPIC 2014 — the flash-animated dystopia about the death of the news. I’m less worried about this dystopia than other scenarios of doom.
Epic tells a history of a future in which by 2014, the New York Times is displaced by GoogleZon, an algorithmically-generated stew of peer-created content, narrowly personalized to the preferences of the individual user.
But the big threat to the New York Times isn’t Google News, which links to traditional news sources. People who get their news from Google wind up reading more traditional sources than people who just read their local paper.
EPIC envisions an AI that constructs news stories themselves, not just a portal to existing stories. But the AI to write an interesting story is a lot harder than the AI to assemble a page of stories based on a popularity algorithm.
The passive faith in AI is belied by the real process of using Amazon recommendations and Technorati today. Amazon algorithmically assembes a set of recommended books, each with a set of human-written recommendations. The reader critically sifts through the recommendations, separating the cogent from the illiterate. If Amazon were building its recommendation service, the recommendations would be linked to deeper blog and profile information about the reviewer, providing further material to check trustworthiness.
Meanwhile, the formulaic crime-and-accident coverage of today’s local news might as well be written by a bot. In-depth coverage by special-interest bloggers not infrequently beats the shallow, formulaic coverage of the mainstream media.
Also, I don’t think personalization is as big a problem as EPIC makes it out to be, although folks have been worried about it since Nicholas Negroponte popularized “The Daily Me” in the mid-90s. Social networks with external links can broaden cultural reference at least as much as they shrink them, and surely more than the narrow mass media. I can get more diverse music references in a couple of hours with iTunes, LastFM, Webjay, Amazon and Google than in a lifetime with ClearChannel.
Not to mention the fact that newspaper circulation has been falling since the 60s, under competitive pressure from radio and TV. EPIC deplores and bemoans a world where the news is shallow and sensationalistic — but that world was created by TV “disaster-of-the-day” coverage.
The big threat is from Craigslist, which cannibalizes the classified ad revenue that accounts for the newspapers’ profit margin. Good investigative journalism takes money and time. Journalist need money to eat. It’s an open question whether alternate business models — different from the classified and space ads in traditional newspapers — will generate enough money to keep investigative journalism afloat.

In a way, I’m glad that the mainstream media and the R’s are underestimating Howard Dean, making jokes about “the scream”, hordes of latte-swilling leftists with bad hair, and wacky radical ideas.
Meanwhile, Dean’s platform calls for rebuilding the party from the ground up, supporting candidates in local elections, building a message bottom up.

The most compelling bit about Adam Werbach’s jeremiad about the death of environmentalism was the vision for a New Apollo Project that would invest in clean energy infrastructure, end dependence on foreign oil, reduce contribution to global warming, and create new business opportunities and jobs.
When Werbach and his team took the story on the road to a town struggling with the lost of manufacturing plants, they were astonished at the hope and enthousiasm that the vision inspired.
Ironically, the rest of the speech is a classic jeremiad exhorting environmentalists to renounce their faith in jeremiads. An environmentalist myth tells a story about a pristine beginning, followed by decline and gruesome collapse and decay. So Werbach tells the elegaic tale: the idealistic beginnings of the environmental movement in the vision of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, through its decline into policy wonkdom and voter-alienating pessimism, and defeat at the hands of cheerful Republican exploiters.
The screed about the death of environmentalism is aimed at persuading old true believers to give up hope in winning environmental issues on their own, and to join the broader progressive movement. If you’re not an old-time true believer, the speech isn’t meant for you. If you’re an old-time disbeliever, the speech will confirm your stereotypes.
Here’s the lesson for rest of us, who are looking to assess today’s situation, and what to do now. Diamond’s Collapse wants to be our generation’s Silent Spring. In “Collapse”, Diamond argues persuasively that societies need to make foresighted decisions to avert the collapse of their civilization brought on by environmental destruction.
The way to inspire people and leaders to make those good decisions isn’t just fear. Fear alone will lead people to put their heads in the sand. The way to inspire people is to provide an hopeful vision that reframes the threat of scarcity into an alternatve vision of abundance.
I’d love to hear a political candidate wrap a story of energy independence, technology progress, business opportunity, and national security. It uses the same story, framed as hope, not fear.

What do do about this?
From a comment on Adam Rice’s blog
“Two weeks ago, my husband

There are two different phases in politics.
In the heat of an election or issue campaign, it’s time to act. The story has been framed long ago. Partisans know what they want, engage fellow partisans to take action, persuade fence-sitters to engage by interest and identity. When time to act is short, it’s counterproductive to return to first principles and question assumptions.
When a decision isn’t at stake, it’s time to talk and think. It’s time to talk to others with different views and ask questions – why do they hold their beliefs, What are the underlying values and motives? Who do they listen to, and why?
It’s time to think about how to reframe the discussion; what’s important, what will work, how to talk in a way that will be heard.