Bill's Big Diamond Blog

Council Law: Bring Your Bikes in NYC Buildings

Closer to home, this is welcome news for bike riders in NYC (especially since we may not have money for subway fare in the coming economy).

In 2006, New York City Council Member David Yassky drafted the Bikes in Buildings bill (Intro. 38) which essentially requires that commercial buildings allow bikes to enter them and create proper storage facilities for said bikes…

…To date, 30 Council Members have signed onto the bill, so things are looking good. (NYC has 51 Council Members)

Link to the bill.

Drilling into Interior Department Corruption

“Drill, baby, drill!”

This was supposed to be the cry of the plaintive Republican convention delegate, urging Congress to beam itself ahead ten years in time, in an effort to make petroleum mining of our shores and Artic wildlife preserves somehow happen miraculously in the present day, lowering the price of gasoline overnight, damn the environmental impact.

Today, however, it seems moans of this refrain actually came from the bedrooms of employees in the Interior Department, engaging in affairs with oil and gas company representatives, while snorting coke and taking bribes to heighten the excitement.  Folks at the Minerals Management Service, according to the Interior Department’s inspector general, worked for most of the Bush Administration in a “culture of ethical failure.”  The former head of this organization stands accused of having expended more effort setting up a consulting contract for a former aide than in collecting the billions owed the government for royalties by oil and gas companies.

The inspector general has uncovered a seedy drama so soap-opera-ready that the agency’s ‘royalty-in-kind’ program may be re-defined as a ‘taking-it-in-trade’ program.  The folks who are supposed to be collecting $4 billion in oil and gas assets in place of cash were apparently focused more on getting a steady supply of sex and drugs than receiving energy stores from the private sector.

In a response many may now echo, Florida Senator Bill Nelson suggested yesterday that the Senate could well hold up granting new offshore drilling rights while the damage from the inspector general’s report sinks in.  It will be interesting to see if the revelations slow the legislative rush to appear to be exploiting domestic oil and gas reserves by opening up more territory to exploration and drilling before the elections.

McCain's Energy Lies

I’ve got to hit the road today and tomorrow, I’m linking to Joseph Romm’s post over at Gristmill for some edifying exposure of lying about energy in the McCain plan for energy independence. Enjoy.

The Real Choices Ahead

I’ve spent a fair amount of ink this past week on Sarah Palin, but aside from what her appointment says about John McCain, she’s probably not make-or-break in the Presidential race. Whether you believe it’s a boldly maverick move to bring along someone with no experience of national politics and barely any experience of statewide office or whether it just seems a tad strange to you that a candidate with so much gravitas himself would trust the country, in the event of his demise, to someone with none to speak of, Sarah Palin’s not the issue.

The main issue in the race for the Presidency seems to be whether the country has had enough of what got us where we are or whether we’re ready to chance that more of the same policies might yield better results in the future. The country is in pretty hard economic times. People are losing their homes and jobs at a fast enough clip to make one wonder whether things might just be getting worse still. $600 stimulus checks haven’t stopped a rising unemployment rate and the failure of several banks, a major investment house, two major mortgage lenders, and other predatory ones.

Tax cuts for the rich have drained the fat of the land into the coffers of those with the ability to invest it anywhere in the world they like, while workers real wages have stagnated and their jobs continue to disappear abroad. Health savings accounts provide tax deductible cash for elective treatments and health club memberships— if you can afford them— while tens of millions of harder pressed citizens can’t afford to get an annual checkup without health insurance.

We’re besieged in the opinion of the world. We haven’t found a way to unite the country around shared values some seven years after being attacked by a small gang of terrorists and five and one half years after attacking a country those terrorists didn’t come from in response. Most of the policies our government has pursued seem to be like rubber to Al Queda and glue for our troops bogged down in internal sectarian conflicts halfway around the world.

We’ve been through the drowning of a great American city and we now have a candidate who shared his birthday celebration with President Bush as it happened, but he later said he’d have landed Air Force One at the nearest base to New Orleans if he’d been the Commander-in-Chief. The city is still at risk from hurricane flooding and some tens of thousands of its residents even now are unable to reoccupy their homes.

We have a continuing assault on the civil liberties that made America the beacon of democratic hope around the world. We have a government that has institutionalized torture as a way to fight those would subject our troops and civilians to torture themselves and called it a necessary ‘dark side’ to war. When confronted with evidence that illegal imprisonments and torturous interrogations were being executed without deference to the Constitution’s ban and international agreements’ prohibition of them, our President merely waved away inconvenient facts— and dared the judiciary to enforce their rulings.

When confronted with unpleasant facts, this Administration has responded with character assassination and even by revealing covert identities of covert agents to retaliate against critics. When Administration figures were convicted of crimes involved, the President’s response was to commute any meaningful sentence against his Vice President’s aide and describe him in glowing terms.

The same Administration that puffs so loudly about terror 24/7 spends little energy securing nuclear materials around the world and putting salve on the conflicts that make their eventual use a little more likely every day. While they invaded a country supposedly to pre-empt nuclear proliferation with manufactured evidence, the government as a whole is pathetic in its inability to address the spread of nuclear materials for profit and ideology from sites around the world.

The last seven years of inaction against climate change and energy dependence on foreign oil have sunk the entire planet into a tailspin from which we don’t really know we’ll recover. One thing about the current energy and environmental mess we do know is that it was utterly predictable. In fact, the scientists who told us it would happen worked for the government in some cases. But the current Administration muzzled them, lest their cries of alarm trouble the citizenry about their strong support for the petroleum barons who put them in power. And now, the successor to the throne of the party in power leads chants of “Drill, Baby, Drill,” as a solution to the problem.

Even against this backdrop and years of backing the President, Mr. McCain hopes the country will still think of him as somehow separate from the party and the policies he’s endorsed and supported for Mr. Bush. He hopes that voters are more interested an ambience of freshness emanating from an unknown and appealing woman from the North and that they will fear another unknown, what a new and very different President might mean for their future.

If Americans are distracted enough by the hoopla about war heroism and the snarky things said about community organizing and supposed elitism to forget all that we’ve been through over the past seven years of hard right policies, perhaps America will be getting what it wants and deserves. Otherwise, this coming election ought to be a referendum on whether those policies have worked out so well for us.

New We Campaign Ad

Friedman from Greenland: Climate Change is Here

I’m not a big follower of Thomas Friedman on most subjects. But everyone should read his pieces on climate change. He’s traveled the world to places where the changes are already profound and asked people there to be the canaries in the coal mine for the rest of us. His column today is from Greenland:

Traditional climate patterns that Greenland elders
have known their whole lives have changed so
quickly in some places that “the accumulated
experience of older people is not as valuable as
before,” said Rosing. The river that was always
there is now dry. The glacier that always covered
that hill has disappeared. The reindeer that were
always there when the hunting season opened on
Aug. 1 didn’t show up.

An Summer Energy-Saving Moment

Permit me to step away from the Veepstakes speculation for a moment, take no position on whether Obama will announce a Vice-Presidential pick tomorrow, whether McCain will begin running a series of Charlton Heston memorial ads, or whether Hillary Clinton will really answer the phone personally if you call at 3 AM.

I’d like to take a few moments to discuss energy. Yes, very exciting. In fact, while the cost of energy is driving decisions in our everyday life, from whether to fly off on vacation to how much our rent increases will be, it’s not so thrilling to read about. It’s even less thrilling to conserve. But in an era when our oceans are rising along with the cost of everything energy-related, it might be worth a couple of minutes to think about the savings one can achieve simply by wasting less of a precious commodity.

Let’s take heating and cooling: It’s not too cool to think about heat at this time of year, but the same principles apply to air conditioning. Heating and cooling account for 50 to 70% of the energy used in the average American home. That’s pretty significant. If your Con Edison bill is like mine, saving a portion of that by keeping your home better insulated and using efficient heating and cooling systems and appliances can add up over time.

Now imagine what that energy savings, over time, might amount to if you applied it to every low-income home in America. That’s the kind of savings that could be realized, at low cost, by supporting the Low-Income Home Energy Assistance Program. Legislation was introduced recently in the U.S. Senate that would have provided additional funding for the 38 million low-income households who qualify for assistance to actually receive that help towards heating, cooling, and insulating their homes. It failed to pass the Senate.

Next time you hear someone going on about drilling offshore for oil, tell them about the immediate savings that the Senate passed up. That's savings that would have helped lower demand for fuel now, not in ten or fifteen years, when the Earth will have passed a point of no return on global warming. Then ask them to imagine what that savings would have meant to the 38 million households living at or below the poverty line.

h/t Bob Herbert

CO2 Through the Roof: Jet Propulsion Labs Climate Change Site

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has some great information up about climate change. The CO2 chart above is a pretty compelling piece of evidence for anyone who wants a long-long term picture of what human activity over the last 60 years has done to the atmosphere.

As for reasons to be concerned about the warming trend under way as a result, NASA has this to say:

"The current warming trend is of particular significance because most of it is very likely human-induced and proceeding at a rate that is unprecedented in the past 1,300 years."

Check out the entire climate change site at NASA/JPL. (A big hat tip to Gristmill for this)

America's Future and Clean Energy

Where ink is being spilled at all over Al Gore’s call for a carbon-free electrical grid in the United States, so far it’s mostly been used to ridicule the totality of the goal. It’s fascinating to see resistance and denial mount, even in the face of overwhelming evidence that humanity is in the throes of an unprecedented crisis. What is it that makes climate change so hard to face?

It’s been suggested that our denial stems from the more immediate challenges we must deal with, what with our tanking economy and a lack of public confidence in the direction of the country generally. It’s certainly true that the U.S. faces huge economic issues; rising joblessness, a housing crisis of unprecedented proportions, and huge increases in energy costs. But addressing these problems could easily dovetail with addressing global warming.

Here’s how:

An investment in clean energy development could spur major increases in employment— in the short term. If the federal government were to favor clean energy production in some of the same ways the Germans already do, a boom in solar and other energy companies would make for a hiring boom in this sector. Development of electric cars with higher MPG ratings would help Detroit dig out of the crisis it’s now in, fighting layoffs and factory closings. Additionally, increased investments in mass transit would require construction workers get to work now, rather than waiting for housing starts to come around again in the distant future.

The prospect that more domestic energy production is on the way soon would ease the leverage that OPEC countries have over America’s long-term strategic interests. The outflow of military money and diplomatic energy that currently goes towards keeping Saudi princes in power and towards securing oil fields in the Middle East and Persia, with all of the attendant exposure to tribal and religious conflicts in that region would diminish. This reduced security exposure could strengthen the struggling U.S. domestic economy.

The ever-present schism in American politics between those who oppose foreign intervention to protect domestic economic interests and those who unflinchingly support U.S. military strength would tend to lessen, as both goals would align more closely. The often tortured logic that separates human rights and self-interest would be less pragmatically attractive to our leaders. As our energy footprint became more independent of foreign raw materials sources, our security interests would change in a holistic way too.

The current cynicism and lack of enthusiasm for the future that plagues the American economy and political system would be tremendously lessened by a patriotic and forward-looking goal that addresses the biggest problems facing the world. If Americans look back with fond feeling on the optimism that built the post-World War II boom years in our nation, a fresh dedication to new challenges facing the 21st century world would provide a positive outlet for the can-do attitude that made that American era of prosperity possible in the first place.

The broad outlines of our choice are starkly clear. Either Americans embrace the challenge of clean energy— and national renewal— fully, or we retreat into denial and defensiveness, also limiting our future view to the immediate and pessimistic horizon. Either we divide further into haves and have-nots or look for common solutions together. The goals outlined in the climate change fight are up for discussion and refinement. The facts facing us are not. America has led the world, for better and for worse, to the crisis we now face. It’s up to us whether we choose to lead the way out of it as well.

The Electric Horseman

You have to hope that we’re seeing the advent of an era of challenge and effort on clean energy and cleaner transportation. If we aren’t, we’re all surely cooked (literally). Perhaps, Al Gore’s declaration about moving to a carbon-free energy grid in the coming decade will set down a piece of the challenge.

Gore has demanded an Apollo-scale effort towards changing the energy grid over. As the former Vice President laid out in his address yesterday, our geopolitical and economic problems have a direct overlay with our climate problems:

…when you connect the dots, it turns out that the
real solutions to the climate crisis are the very same
measures needed to renew our economy and
escape the trap of ever-rising energy prices.
Moreover, they are also the very same solutions we
need to guarantee our national security without
having to go to war in the Persian Gulf.

Al Gore says what politicians who are running for office can’t— that our culture is running out of time to change our ways. He can afford to point out the drastic nature of the energy shift required. If we don’t stop burning up all the carbon on the planet for electricity and transportation, heating it up and disrupting the climate, our progeny won’t be around for long. While transportation is a huge portion of the problem, the energy grid is related. Gore’s goal addresses this important piece of the carbon puzzle and the economic needs of consumers:

We could further increase the value and efficiency
of a Unified National Grid by helping our struggling
auto giants switch to the manufacture of plug-in
electric cars. An electric vehicle fleet would sharply
reduce the cost of driving a car, reduce pollution,
and increase the flexibility of our electricity grid. At
the same time, of course, we need to greatly
improve our commitment to efficiency and
conservation. That’s the best investment we can
make.

The economic fallout of the climate crisis is huge— and getting Americans in line with facing it also means supporting economic justice in the process. Gore is cognizant of this:

Of course, we could and should speed up this
transition by insisting that the price of carbon-based
energy include the costs of the environmental
damage it causes. I have long supported a sharp
reduction in payroll taxes with the difference made
up in CO2 taxes. We should tax what we burn, not
what we earn.

According to Gore, there’s even more good news for strapped consumers in electric power renewal from a transportation perspective:

…there actually is one extremely effective way to
bring the costs of driving a car way down within a
few short years. The way to bring gas prices down
is to end our dependence on oil and use the
renewable sources that can give us the equivalent
of $1 per gallon gasoline.

One can hope he’s getting through to enough decision-makers to open up some political space for discussion about the biggest crisis we face as a species. However, if press and blogosphere reaction to Gore’s speech yesterday is any indication, we have a long way to go in the U.S. before we take climate change seriously. Gore himself may be partly responsible for the mixed reaction to his speech (with comments like those on tornado activity), but largely, it’s the inertia in our political system that’s to blame for a lack of MSM-ruckus today.

Gore’s yardstick— a total, decade-long shift to carbon-free energy production, may not be totally achievable, but it’s only possible to motivate the nation with a complete goal (50% of something only inspires people halfway, no?).

In the end, with due respect for honest critiques and realistic qualifications, any goal to clean up the energy grid has to aim high and take the risk of falling short. The only way to put this challenge in context is to consider the other option:

To those who say 10 years is not enough time, I
respectfully ask them to consider what the world’s
scientists are telling us about the risks we face if we
don’t act in 10 years. The leading experts predict
that we have less than 10 years to make dramatic
changes in our global warming pollution lest we lose
our ability to ever recover from this environmental
crisis.

Gore points out that a decade may be as far away as Americans will believe in a goal being meaningful, especially to a political system which responds not at all to longer-term goals, but at least has experience with the space program:

Ten years is about the maximum time that we as a
nation can hold a steady aim and hit our target.
When President John F. Kennedy challenged our
nation to land a man on the moon and bring him
back safely in 10 years, many people doubted we
could accomplish that goal. But 8 years and 2
months later, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin
walked on the surface of the moon.

The telling factor for energy success may be seeing how much Gore has learned about realpolitik since the 2000 Florida debacle. Whether the We Campaign creates enough leverage as a movement to address climate crisis depends heavily on whether the once-would-be President Gore is still willing to step politely aside for those who would grab power more rudely— or whether he’s learned what a street fight is all about.

Whether Gore is the perfect leader or not, we ought to hope he’s ready to fight and win this battle. When it comes to global warming, the loser won’t be around long to look dignified in defeat.