the intersection of emergency preparedness, public health and environmental policy
We might say “the key to the future is a sustainable agricultural and economic system in which each member’s net negative carbon footprint, or their net incremental carbon cost is zero.”
Johnny Appleseed, on the other hand, would simply say just “Plant more trees, especially apple, grow more grains, vegetables, and roots like the groundnut.”
“And,” he might add, “do you really need to drive to the mall in a military transport vehicle?”
Excerpts from Gore’s Speech © THE NOBEL FOUNDATION 2007:
The distinguished scientists with whom it is the greatest honor of my life to share this award have laid before us a choice between two different futures – a choice that to my ears echoes the words of an ancient prophet: “Life or death, blessings or curses. Therefore, choose life, that both thou and thy seed may live.”
We, the human species, are confronting a planetary emergency – a threat to the survival of our civilization that is gathering ominous and destructive potential even as we gather here. But there is hopeful news as well: we have the ability to solve this crisis and avoid the worst – though not all – of its consequences, if we act boldly, decisively and quickly.
However, despite a growing number of honorable exceptions, too many of the world’s leaders are still best described in the words Winston Churchill applied to those who ignored Adolf Hitler’s threat: “They go on in strange paradox, decided only to be undecided, resolved to be irresolute, adamant for drift, solid for fluidity, all powerful to be impotent.”
So today, we dumped another 70 million tons of global-warming pollution into the thin shell of atmosphere surrounding our planet, as if it were an open sewer. And tomorrow, we will dump a slightly larger amount, with the cumulative concentrations now trapping more and more heat from the sun.
On the afternoon of Thursday, 8 April 2004, U.S. troops stationed in Iraq deployed a small remote-controlled robot to search for improvised explosive devices. The robot, a PackBot unit made by iRobot Corp., of Burlington, Mass., found an IED, but the discovery proved its undoing. The IED exploded, reducing the robot to small, twisted pieces of metal, rubber, and wire.
The confrontation between robot and bomb reflects a grim paradox of the ongoing conflict in Iraq. The PackBot’s destruction may have prevented the IED from claiming a soldier’s life—as of 31 August, IEDs accounted for nearly half of the 3299 combat deaths reported by coalition forces. But the fact remains that a US $100 000 piece of machinery was done in by what was probably a few dollars’ worth of explosives, most likely triggered using a modified cellphone, a garage-door opener, or even a toy’s remote control. During the past four and a half years, the United States and its allies in Iraq have fielded the most advanced and complex weaponry ever developed. But they are still not winning the war.
Although there has been much debate and finger-pointing over the various failures and setbacks suffered during the prolonged conflict, some military analysts and counterterrorism experts say that, at its heart, this war is radically different from previous ones and must be thought of in an entirely new light.
From Robert N. Charette’s piece at IEEE’s Spectrum:
“What we are seeing is the empowerment of the individual to conduct war,” says John Robb, a counterterrorism expert and author of the book Brave New War (John Wiley & Sons), which came out in April. While the concept of asymmetric warfare dates back at least 2000 years, to the Chinese military strategist Sun-tzu, the conflict in Iraq has redefined the nature of such struggles [see photo, “Road to Perdition” As events are making painfully clear, Robb says, warfare is being transformed from a closed, state-sponsored affair to one where the means and the know-how to do battle are readily found on the Internet and at your local RadioShack. This open global access to increasingly powerful technological tools, he says, is in effect allowing “small groups to…declare war on nations.”
Need a missile-guidance system? Buy yourself a Sony PlayStation 2. Need more capability? Just upgrade to a PS3. Need satellite photos? Download them from Google Earth or Microsoft’s Virtual Earth. Need to know the current thinking on IED attacks? Watch the latest videos created by insurgents and posted on any one of hundreds of Web sites or log on to chat rooms where you can exchange technical details with like-minded folks.
Robb calls this new type of conflict “open-source warfare,” because the manner in which insurgent groups are organizing themselves, sharing information, and adapting their strategies bears a strong resemblance to the open-source movement in software development. Insurgent groups, like open-source software hackers, tend to form loose and nonhierarchical networks to pursue a common vision, Robb says. United by that vision, they exchange information and work collaboratively on tasks of mutual interest.
Link to Charette’s complete piece. Charette is also the editor of the IEEE blog The Risk Factor.
This battle is being fought, and will be won, on the streets. And in New York City the hybrids are winning. New York’s Dept. of Transportation and other agencies are replacing their Ford Taurus and Contours with Prius and Civic Hybrids, not Hummers.
As of May of this year, 375 of approx. 13,000 yellow cabs had hybrid engines. The City has mandated that by 2012, 100% of the yellow taxi fleet must be hybrids. Link to NYC press release here. The new Ford Escape Hybrids get 30 MPG. The vehicle they will replace, the Ford Crown Victoria, gets 14 mpg. Taxi drivers in NYC absorb all the operating costs, including gas. So if they can spend less money on gas - they pocket the difference, and they make more money. $9,000, assuming 80,000 miles and $3.00 per gallon.
The next step will be the 38,540 livery vehicles licensed by the Taxi and Limousine Commission, often referred to as “black cars,” the predominant model being black Lincoln Town Cars, which also get about 12 miles per gallon.
There is no government mandate to switch, however, a combination of market forces and one government incentive seems to have sparked the beginning of a change in the right direction. Outside Goldman Sachs‘ offices on Pearl and Broad, across the street from Fraunces Tavern, at any given time, you can see two or three Prius “limos” among the Town Cars. The Priuses get 40 mpg. The Lincolns get 12. The fuel costs for a Lincoln are about $20,000 per year, three and a half times higher than $6,000 for a Prius. Which translates to $14,000 more for the drivers.
The drivers love them - they pocket the cash. The passengers love them - they are a much quieter ride, they are better for the environment, and as an added bonus, they are permitted to use the High Ooccupancy Vechicle / Low Emissions Vehicle aka (Clean Pass) lanes. In New York rush-hour traffic, this could cut some trips in half - and cut from half an hour to an hour off of a rush-hour trip to Newark or La Guardia.
They’re also good enough for the United States Army’s Special Operations Command, which includes the Special Forces, and would include the Delta Force, if it officially existed. For other large groups of vehicles - the Postal Service, the New York City Police Department, our ambulances - using hybrid engnes isn’t even part of the public discussion, yet. But it will be. Write your Rep in Congress. Senate - Click Here, House, Click Here.
An outfit called CNW Market Research, which advertises “Clarity Context Vision” like Fox News uses the term “Fair and Balanced,” published a “study” claiming that the Hummer H2 has less of an environmental impact than the Prius. You can look for the 450 + page report here.
CNW asserts that the per mile cost of the Hummer H2 is $3.027 and the Prius is $3.249.
Heidi Hauenstein and Laura Schewel of the Rocky Mountain Institute analyze the data and conclude that CNW’s mathematics was flawed. You can find the their report on the web pages of EV World. They say that IF CNW’s methodology is correct, the Prius has a significantly lower impact on the environment than the Hummer. And, by the way, they question CNW’s methodology.
Dr. Peter Gleick of the Pacific Institute also weighed in on the debate. (Click Here) He states “the report’s conclusions rely on faulty methods of analysis, untenable assumptions, selective use and presentation of data, and a complete lack of peer review. Even the most cursory look reveals serious bias and flaws: the average Hummer H1 is assumed to travel 379,000 miles and last for 35 years, while the average Prius is assumed to last only 109,000 miles over less than 12 years. … “Dust to Dust” has already distorted the public debate.”
So here’s what I think.
Using those assumptions, My back-of-envelope reckoning concludes that the Hummer will burn 12,500 gallons and the Prius 2,500 as they are driven those 100,000 miles. That’s a difference of 10,000 gallons of gas. At $3.00 per gallon, fuel will cost $37,500 to drive the Hummer and $7,500 to drive the Prius. That’s $30,000 bucks. And if the average price of gas is $4.00 over the life of the vehicle, it’s $40,000.
Ignoring the purchase cost, and assuming $3.00 per gallon, the fuel cost is 38 cents per mile for the Hummer, and 8 cents per mile for the Prius. Factoring the costs to purchase the vehicle, and the cost of oil changes every 3000 miles, (34 oil changes at $25 each) the costs to drive a Hummer H2 are $92,460 while the costs to drive a Prius are $30,525. This works out to 92 cents per mile for the H2 and 31 cents per mile for the Prius.
So the bottom line is I don’t care what CNW says, altho it would be nice if their arguments were logical, coherent, and based on fact. Regardless, my next new car will be an aerodynamic hybrid.
Reading Blind Spot: The Secret History of American Counterterrorism by Timothy Naftali. Thus far, excellent history of U.S. responses to terrorist attacks - in each of the varieties in which they occurred from the Nazi “stay-behind” program to 9/11.
More and some excerpts shortly.
Back in 2000 Nader said there ain’t no difference between George W. Bush and Al Gore. I disagreed back then, and disagree today. But let’s look at some of the Republicans and Democrats today.
The Republican candidates:
Contrast the Liberal Democrats. John Edwards and Barak Obama have put forth plans to provide health care for all Americans, including the 1 out of 6 who have no health insurance and therefore very limited access to health care. While she hasn’t discussed the details, Hillary
The calendars may say “21st Century” but the Republicans are still fighting the Skopes trial. The Democrats want to fund stem cell research.
Greenspan says ‘We invaded Iraq for Oil!’
Well, now that the cat is out of the bag, lets do the math. Iraq, according to the Global Policy Forum, and the CIA , Iraq has 112.5 Billion Barrels of “proven reserves” of oil. At $80 per barrel … Iraq’s oil is worth $9.0 Trillion. We’re only spending $1 trillion, so it’s a pretty good return on investment. 900 percent return on investment for the 112.5 billion barrels of proven reserves.
And they said George W couldn’t do math.
And Iraq’s “probable reserves” are estimated to be another 200 billion barrels. If the “probable” reserves are only another 100 billion barrels - that’s 212.5 billion barrels of oil. Black Gold. Texas Tea. That ups the ante to 1,700% ROI. Why that’s better than Microsoft’s historic $3 thousand in 1986 worth $One Million in 1999.
Of course this is assuming we win the war. There are people who suggest that we have given Al Queda 9 to 17 Trillion Dollars worth of oil. Some people are just negative.
Pollution kills 750 thousand per year in China, according to a self-censored World Bank study described in the Independent and on Yahoo News. According to these reports, the Chinese government is suppressing knowledge of the issue, rather than addressing the problem, and the World Bank agreed to suppress the data.
While three quarters of a million people in a population of one point three billion is only six out of ten thousand and is a low percentage of the population, this corresponds to 173 thousand Americans. If 173 thousand Americans were dying each year from pollution, which is slightly more than the 150,000 Americans who die each year from stroke, we might be upset.
The worse things are:
As China continues to industrialize, as they put an additional 1000 cars on the road each day, things will only get worse.
And according to the World Watch Institute, 16 of the worlds 20 most polluted cities are in China.
From Irwin Redlener’s Americans at Risk:
Even if the nation’s intelligence capacity is substantially strengthened and homeland security better assured, these systems will never be perfect. An American city could conceivably experience the nightmare of a nuclear detonation. The essential point is that the quality and extent of survival and recovery, even from a nuclear bomb, are affected by the success of our preparedness and mitigation programs.
The current presidential administration is, of course, now well-known for its argument that it “didn’t want the smoking gun to become a mushroom cloud.” Implicit - by omission - was that the strategy of pre-empting the (hypothetical or fictional) threat of nuclear attack by Iraq would so likely to succeed that it wasn’t necessary to take steps to mitigate or prepare for the effects of a nuclear attack.
I’m shocked, Shocked, to find the Chinese using lead paints on toys for toddlers.
They put Etheylene Glyclol as a substitute for Glycerin in toothpaste and a few years ago in medications. Ethylene glycol works great as antifreeze, but it’s poisonous in small doses.
In The River Runs Black: The Environmental Challenge to China’s Future, available from Amazon, Elizabeth C. Economy describes “In late July 2001, the fertile Huai River Valley - China’s breadbasket - was the site of an environmental disaster. Heavy rains flooded the river’s tributaries, flushing more than 38 billion gallons of highly polluted water into the Huai. Downstream, in Anhui province, the river water was thick with garbage, yellow foam, and dead fish. … Only seven months earlier, the government had proclaimed its success in cleaning up the Huai. A six-year campaign to rid the region of polluting factories that dumped their wastewater into the river had ostensibly raised the quality of the water in the river and its more than one hundred tributaries to the point that people could once again fish, irrigate their crops, and even drink from the river.”
They lied and their people die.
In Deep Economy, also available on Amazon, Bill McKibben describes “a trip to China, where I met a twelve-year-old girl named Zhao Lin Tao, who was the same age as my daughter and who lived in a poor rural village in Sichuan province - that is she’s about the most statistically average person on earth. Zhao was the one person in her village I could talk to without an interpreter: she was proudly speaking the pretty good English she’d learned in the overcrowded village school. When I asked her about her life though, she was soon in tears: her mother had gone to the city to work in a factory and never returned, abandoning her and her sister to her father, who beat them regularly because they were not boys. Because Zhao’s mother was away the authorities were taking care of her school fees until ninth grade, but after that there would be no money to pay. Her sister had already given up and dropped out.”
What’s one or two girls in a population of one billion three hundred million?
Unofficially HIV Aids follows trade and prostitution. January, 2006, the Chinese government, (www.avert.org/aidschina.htm) reported 650,000 people living with AIDS, down from the 2003 estimate of 840,000, and up from 1989, when AIDS was known as “aizibing,” the “Loving Capitalism Disease” and it was reported at 153 Chinese and 41 foreigners.
If they are correct in their characterization of HIV Aids as the disease of loving capitalism, boy are they in trouble.
