Reality Based Policy

It's always nice to find articles which clearly articulate a belief strongly held. It's ironic in this case when the article is about the slow re-emergence of facts over ideology. Far and away the worst problem I have with the current Republican ideology is their inability to incorporate facts into their world view. I like it when people change their minds after new information enters the scene. I have seen where Obama asks experts for the facts and their opinions, then uses those inputs to make decisions. He doesn't just step up and say, "my gut says we go with Door 2." Ultimately it may come down to a gut instinct, but at least his guts have had exposure to facts first.

In light of the recent economic mudslide, I've pulled a book out of my TBR pile for bedtime reading. Jared Diamond, of Guns, Germs, & Steel fame, also wrote a book called Collapse covering the worst collapses of civilizations in an attempt to figure out why they went down when other civilizations in similar straits did not focusing on those dealing with ecological catastrophes. Turns out he's got a cheery, "cautiously optimistic" outlook he wants to share. And when I read the end first, success comes down to two factors - willingness to acknowledge and deal with ecological problems, and a willingess to change basic ideology when the current beliefs are not helpful.

There seems to be a pervasive notion that people of the past were more in tune with nature and lived easier on the earth. I think that's a load of crap. (J. Diamond does too.) When your farming policy is clearcutting 10 acres for your village's crops, using the land for 4 years then clearcutting another 10 acres, it works fine if there are isolated villages in a large forested area. While you're farming your second area, the first is reclaimed. When the population density goes up, though, you either farm the area too long or clearcut too close together or cut too much for natural reclaim to occur when you're done with the farm. At some point you overwhelm the system and either need to farm a new way, or help the reclaiming along somehow. Some societies put in place decisive policies to improve farming and/or reclaiming and some don't. Those that do keep going on. Those which don't, don't.

I recently read another well written essay on being conservative. If I remember the link I will post it but I suspect I won't. His primary thrust was that "conservatives" look at how we've lived our lives so far and think it's safer to use methods we've already used to solve future problems. Whereas "liberals" see problems which "ought" to be fixed an often propose scary new, untried solutions. Ok.

As with my first paragraph, my problem with "conservative" thinking comes in when the evidence says, "We've tried to do things with methods X,Y,Z for many decades. X works great. Y is marginal and Z causes great harm." and the conservatives say, "Well, X,Y,Z work well for us so lets keep going the way we always have." Either they don't agree that Y is marginal and Z causes great harm, or they don't agree that the harm is sufficient to try wacky new policies B and C. And it makes me want to scream.

I think there are a lot of things currently wrong with how we're going about things. And continuing to do things the same way, I'm convinced, will lead to all kinds of disaster. While I'm still a bit of a "global warming" skeptic, I can totally get behind the "global weirding" idea. What's more immediate in my mind is the volume of pollution and toxins we dump into the air when we already have the technology not to. We've done pretty well with passenger car emissions. We have not done well with trucks. We have not done well (still! thanks to GWB) with coal fired power plants. We have gotten better in some ways about industrial waste. Unfortunately, some of the ways we deal with it are to send it to places that don't have OSHA and the EPA and let them throw it out, or recycle it in hazardous ways. One of the points J. Diamond makes early is that environmentalists and corporations need to work together to solve problems or nothing will happen.

As I see it, we (the people of all countries) need to immediately reduce the amount of mercury we spew into the air. Due to mercury poisoning, there are only 2 fishable rivers in New England and they're pretty restricted too. We need to reduce the particulates from burning anything. The haze of Beijing is the iconic picture of this. We need better methods of recycling things and water and we need to do much more of it. And we need further policies (for lack of a better word) to reduce water and energy waste. What I mean by this last is that we need to set things up so it's easier to use less water/energy and possible but more difficult or costly to use more.

Some would suggest compact fluorescents. But they have pollution issues and I've never have them last long enough to justify their use. We need LEDs or other such technology, preferably. Fluorescents are a stop gap measure at best. As a better example, instead of flow restrictor faucets which limit MAXIMUM flow, keep the maximum high, but make it harder to get maximum flow for most tasks. So when someone just flips the handle on a faucet to wash their hands, they get only 1/3 of the max flow. But instead of getting an anemic trickle have aerators and other dispersers in place to get good coverage with the lower flow. Then if you need to fill a pot, you can push a button (for instance) on the side of the faucet to enable the maximum flow without superhuman strength. I keep seeing people leave the water on while they're doing things away from the water (yes, in this arid area). We'll never convince people not to do this, so make it less harmful when they do.

And my mind is warming to the global warming notion due to having a friend who is a climate scientist who says "global warming" is real based on the data she has seen. And it does make sense. Oil and coal are energy sources that were essentially out of play when stored underground. Solar energy comes and goes regularly and interacts with the surface plants and land and water. If you redirect solar energy either with solar collectors or by burning trees, you're redistributing the energy already in the atmosphere. But when you dig up oil and coal and burn it, you're adding energy to the system that wasn't there before. Adding energy causes temperatures to increase. The fact that we have non-uniform temperatures across the globe means that things won't heat uniformly. Things will, however, interact.

Since corporations don't seem to respond well to concensus, unless there is already evidence or a market in place, I do think government needs to step in with regulations, even if they're different and untried and scary. We can make them temporary trials if we must. When people say "I'd like better gas mileage, we get a couple fringe cars and a lot more of the same. But when the government says "improve fuel economy or there will be financial penalties", then fuel economy gets improved more broadly. I don't think every vehicle must have a gas mileage over 50mpg. Perhaps that's unrealistic for something carrying 20 tons. But for a 2 ton car, it's absolutely possible. I've gone through 20 model years in the cars I've owned as an adult, and had zero improvement in mileage. Actually, I went from 32 to 31 to 30 mpg. Yes, I do have more features and more safety devices I'm hauling around. But if we hadn't had the gas scare in the 70s, it's unlikely I'd even have gas mileage that good.

So to try and wrap up this ramble, I DO think governments need to work with the people and the corporations to force us to work in our own best interests. Where the market doesn't account for the negative externalities, the government needs to step in and do so. Since I want things to change and want to try wacky new ideas to cause that change, I guess that makes me a liberal. However, what those best interests are will always remain in contention and I understand that. So I'd prefer to have a president setting the tone with congress and the populace who has shown that he will be looking out for all the people of the country, not just the folks like him. And who has shown respect for facts and experts. I do think more than our economy is in crisis. I think our ecolosystem is at a crossroads and we can choose the road less traveled by, up 'til now, and make it more of a thoroughfare. If we all have increasingly clean air to breathe and fresh water to drink and the hope of maintaining this state of affairs, I think this civilization of ours will become more prosperous.

My preference, though, is for government to set a goal, not give a roadmap to get there. The mileage one is good: 85% of passenger cars seating 5 or fewer people need to get 50mpg in 10 years without negatively affecting emissions or crash safety. Don't, however, say we have to do it with a certain technology like ethanol, batteries, or hydrogen. Just give us the goal. Then all sorts of people and corporations can try all sorts of technologies and the one or two that seem most promising can be phased in. Make a goal of reducing commercial or residential water use, or charging extra for large consumers. (Yes, I realize this could be bad for my company!) Make a goal of getting out of Iraq...