Sambal

The Commons Blog is a bastion of free market environmentalism: let’s protect Mother Earth, by ensuring strict property rights, functioning free markets, etc., complete with links to Cato Institute reports and Michael Crichton novels (which, by being nominally fictional, can tell the real truth while avoiding the incestuous nature of the peer reviewed literature). And you know, I have to admit, I’m all over this, I love markets, and share the basic value of distrust of government. It’s very difficult for legislators to make correct evaluations of technologies, trade off costs and benefits and who benefits and suffers. So privatization as a means of environmental protection is very appealing to me.

But not just for the environment. National security is another area ripe for privatization. Sure, the tools used in national defence have been produced by industry for some time (can you say, “military-industrial complex”? I knew you could). And, in the current situation in Iraq, much of the heavy lifting, infantry-wise, has been provided by so-called “contractors”. (Salon had a series on these awhile back, or see NYT Magazine.) Still, this is all private industry in service of the government. What true privatization of national defense would mean would be to allow markets to determine, not just how to defend, but what to defend. How much should be spent on military prepardness and action? What countries are worth attacking? Does it depend on the amount of natural resources, weapons of mass destruction, or whether the dictator might go over to the dark side? What are the costs, and what are the benefits? Let the markets decide. Perhaps a system like the privateers of old might work, still regulated by government, but with allocations of resources determined by the Invisible Hand. I think free markets could work just as well for protecting the homeland security-wise as environment-wise.

So I was cruising through EUB Decision 2002-014, the simply fascinating regulatory approval for the Keephills expansion, and I noticed an interesting thing. As a condition of operation, Transalta is required to purchase carbon offsets equivalent to the difference from a combined-cycle natural gas facility of the same capacity, or whatever new standards require, for the life of facility, 30+ years. That’s a big effin’ deal. First of all, if you believe in the whole offset business (and the EUB won’t take either Transalta’s or Alberta Environment’s word for it, they have to get a third party audit), it cuts about 63% off the GHG emissions. So now the electric bike wins easily, as long as I don’t pedal too hard. (I still want a motorcycle. Vroom vroom.) But it’s also a big change from the financial side too. Building a fossil plant is a risk. It’s a bit cheaper today than a renewable plant, but you have to accept the risks of what the fuel is going to cost in the future. You pay your money, you make your choices, and you try to build a diversified portfolio, but still, prices may go up or down. (If you own the coal mine, the risk is hedged, but it’s still there.) What committing to offsets does is add a whole new class of risk: carbon offset price fluctuations. Sure, they are cheap today, but you just promised to buy millions of tons a year, for decades into the future. What’s more, at least with coal, there’s hundreds of years of experience in how the prices fluctuate. With offsets, the market is totally new, and the scientists haven’t even totally decided what offsets count yet, much less figured out how to pass the issue on to the accountants. Can you say price uncertainty? European carbon went from 5 EUR/ton to over 30, in less than six months. What will carbon cost in 2035? I don’t know, but Transalta shareholders are going to find out.

Live octopus tentacle. Fabulous. Watch the video. (Props Pharyngula.)

Nice article from NYT. In a sense, turning wine analysis into LC/MS based optimization is the obvious thing to do, once wine has already been reduced to a single-axis, 100 point score.

The thing is, as a consumer, I do feel a need for this kind of thing. I bought some wine yesterday, and despite having a little interest, and despite the vastly reduced variety available at my local liquor store, I still felt baffled. I read somewhere that there are estimated to be somewhere between 13,000 and 15,000 brands of wine available on the US market. That’s too many. Choice is good, but studies of satisfaction show that people like around 3-5 choices, not 15,000. The rest is just noise. Ditto for microbrews, but at least in beer, people know they’re primarily purchasing a funky label. Collect the whole set.

1. Intent on disrupting your morning commute
2. Sleeps a lot (could be member of so-called “sleeper” cell)
3. Shows interest in bomb-making supplies such as acetone, sulphuric acid, or Kitty Litter
4. Goes out for hours late at night; on returning is not forthcoming about where he went, who he met, or what they were doing
5. Grows facial hair; foregos alcohol, tobacco, and coffee as prescribed in Koran

I found a wind energy calculator to help you assess whether or not to install a turbine on your property, based on a Canadian wind atlas, plus lots of other stuff. I plugged in my postal code, and found out that my region rates as “Good” (a 3 on a six point scale). Fantastic! I’d love some free power. So, what exactly does “good” mean?

Based on my consumption, in my postal code, the calculator recommended 4 1kW generators, each on a 19m pole. Neighbors are gonna love that. But hey, maybe they like green power too, and won’t be concerned by the bird kill.

Installation cost, including hardware and labor, is estimated at $25k. More than I have in my wallet, but that’s okay, maybe we can finance it. It takes money to make money, and the power is free, right? So what the ROI, or, in terms the efficiency types like, the payback on that puppy? The calculator knows how much power costs here, so it can work all that out.

The answer is (drumroll please): 91 years. No typo, ninety-one. I’ll be dead, and probably my kids too, and no doubt my house will have been gone for decades before it pays off. Oh yeah, not to mention the turbine itself, which has only a 25 year life expectancy.

Unless, of course, you include financing costs. Or required maintainence and overhauls. Maintenence and overhauls, by itself, costs twice as much as the power its generating. Even if the system were entirely free, and sitting in my backyard tomorrow, it couldn’t pay for its own maintenance!

So this is what it’s like to live in a “good” spot for wind power. I’d hate to see the numbers for “mediocre”.

Get a plot for your next novel, or hack it up as a perl script and hope for fame.

The biggest risk to (class of entity) in (location) is due to (peril), and can only be avoided by (remedy).

Here are some lists to get you started on the first three. The remedies, I can’t help you with.

{life | life on this planet | human life on this planet | endangered
species | human health and happiness | political stability |
business/economy | my job | my health }

{the Universe at large | this planet | my nation | my town | my
family | my head}

{war (conventional) | war (nuclear) | tribal strife | terrorism |
crime | corruption | resource exhaustion (oil) | resource exhaustion
(fossil fuel) | resource exhaustion (water) | resource exhaustion
(tantalum) | erosion | desertification | soil salinification | ocean
desalinification | climate change (global) | climate change (local) |
nuclear winter | fishery collapse | currency collapse | the
Republicans | the Democrats | the Internet | AI | nanotechnology run
amok | GM crops | BSE | avian flu | pollution (air) | pollution
(water) | religion | atheism | overpopulation | television | meteor
impact | extinctions of large predators | surfeits of large predators}