Microbes making petrolium

A Silicon Valley company called LS9 is fermenting waste plant matter and getting petroleum out of it. "Scientists find bugs that eat waste and excrete petrol," says The Times Online. This goes quite nicely with I, Cringley's column calling for a change of our "platform" for energy. October 2007 National Geographic Magazine suggested such a breakthrough wasn't far away.

Bush Did His Best

I'm reasonably certain that George W. Bush has done what he though was best for the country at most if not all opportunities. I just don't think he was very smart about quite a few huge items on the domestic and international stages. I imagine this is for a variety of reasons: 1) I don't think he is very accepting of opinions differing from his once he's made up his mind. 2) I suspect several of his advisers are acting in self-interest (consider the Cheney-Haliburton connection, for one, and see the amount of money being funneled into political campaigns and lobbying in Washington for another source of corruption) 3) I expect he gets much of his input from those advisers before making up his mind and 4) I'm not convinced that he is especially smart, given his C grades at Yale. None of this says he's a bad person or in any way unpatriotic, just misinformed, resolute, and ill-suited to his present job.

Domestically, the only complaints I have with him are regarding logging old-growth forests that had previously been protected and an energy policy that focuses on increased consumption of non-renewable resources and research into inefficient renewables like ethanol and hydrogen fuel cells to the exclusion of other, more urgent needs like improving vehicle fuel efficiency and our railroad system. I also don't like his warrantless wiretapping on U.S. citizens, which you might say is justified, but I would point out that there is a court in place to authorize such things, and the court was not consulted. "No Child Left Behind" has proven to be aimed at getting students out of public schools and into private ones, because its requirements are impossible to meet. How are English as a second language (ESL) students going to improve their test scores as a group when the group is always rotating because they are the ones who are new to the country? I'm also disappointed in various political appointments, such as Michael Brown as FEMA head, who had no relevant experience when he took the job. There are a few other issues, but those are the biggest in my mind today.

Politicians favoring cronies has cost many countries much livelihood. I imagine it is mostly corruption that Mexicans have to thank for their present economic state. In every administration, and especially in the most recent, we have a fine example of our President returning political favors by making appointments of unqualified people to various positions and then wondering why things didn't work out. If I were President, I would hire a staffing firm to find some qualified cabinet members!

Internationally, Bush got off on the wrong foot at the start of his administration when he as much as said, "The Middle East is not my problem. Let the Middle Easterners sort it out." It didn't take him long to change his tune. The war with Iraq was a colossal blunder and should not have been undertaken. It was a presented as a conflation of two events that were unrelated (9/11 hijackings were clearly linked to Al Quida and Afghanistan, but not to Iraq). The Iraq reconstruction was undertaken with all the foresight of a fifth grader. We learned much in the reconstruction of Japan and West Germany that could have been useful in Iraq, but history was disregarded because we supposedly had new methods that would make troops more efficient. When Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki suggested in a Congressional Briefing that it might take "several hundred thousand soldiers," more troops than the White House wanted, he was sidelined within four months of that accurate assessment because it was not politically expedient. Guantanamo Bay is a national disgrace. How can we claim to be fighting terrorism when we take innocent civilians off the streets in foreign countries and imprison them halfway around the globe? Ah, "But they're not innocent", you might say. And I ask how you would know that, since they haven't been tried in 5 years, they haven't had access to courts, and everything related to the camp has been a fiasco. These people have been held against their will and without any recourse whatsoever. What's more, a number of them have been tortured. It is only this White House that would try to coerce information from a prisoner who hasn't been in the loop for 5 years. Imagine the furious families those political prisoners left behind. Unfortunately, the nearly solo invasion and continued occupation of Iraq has cost this country dearly in terms of international clout. (If you doubt this, try discussing our President with any foreigner, or better yet, travel abroad and discuss our politics.) You don't have to take my word for it, either. Just look at the performance of the U.S. Dollar for his term. It has been on a steady decline.

In summary, I suppose if Bush had been specifically determined to ruin our country, he would have been more efficient about it, but he has fairly effectively ruined the economy by spending money we didn't have for a war we didn't need, taken our freedoms by listening to our communications, spent our international political capital to zero, and done his best to see that the public school system is ineffective. In all, he has done a fantastic job of wrecking things in spite of his best efforts.

Save the planet - ride a bus

In the words of yesterday's N&O headline, "Panel Blames Warming on Man." Well arrest him, already! Seriously - we have known for years that there was some dramatic climate change underway, and the primary controversy has been due to corporate-funded disinformation campaigns. ($16 million in financing for the campaigns and Exxon Mobil is frequently mentioned among the perpetrators.) But what kind of change is it?

2006 was one of the hottest years on record, state by state[1]. Man is responsible for the change[2]. If you shut down the Gulf Stream by melting the Greenland ice sheets, the whole North Atlantic area (England and Europe come to mind) suddenly drops 9 degrees C[3]. Melt all that ice and where does it go? Into the ocean, of course, raising the sea level and changing the coastline dramatically[4]. Is it any wonder I don't live on today's coast?

We need to undertake a coordinated effort to address our greenhouse gas emissions. The Kyoto Protocol is one such effort, to which most countries agreed, with Australia and the United States the most notable shirks and among the worst polluters, too. The United States is 17th in the world in per-capita oil consumption [5] and first in oil consumption as a country [6]. We need to figure out how to conserve. Hint: not by using hydrogen fuel cells. They are hopelessly inefficient, especially when charged by electricity from a coal or oil generating plant.[7] We need to genuinely conserve, and one of the best ways we can do that is by public transit.

I had an interesting conversation with a staunch Republican friend of mine not too long ago about the price of gas. My premise, for the sake of the discussion, was that gasoline should be taxed to a cost of $5/gallon (brought there gradually), and the revenue generated should be put into establishing usable public transit systems. Her argument was that it was a regressive tax unfairly targeting the poor. (That and taxes and government are bad in the first place.) What if the public transit were genuinely efficient? Then the automobile would become a rich man's convenience and the train, bus, and other transit would be for the common folk. A subway ride in Mexico City costs 15 cents. Why not have bargains like that here?

When I lived and worked on a bus route, I took the bus to work. With my present job location, it would turn a 15 minute commute into a 1-hour ordeal to take the bus, so I drive or ride my bicycle. Biking and public transit is my personal answer to the climate change problem, that and NC Green Power to offset CO2 emissions from my electricity usage. What do you do?

Most bus systems have their schedules online for easy reference. Some, like TTA, even have door-to-door routing. You tell it when and where you want to go, and it tells you which buses, which changes, and even how long you'll spend walking. TTA's routing system even includes routing with the various city transit systems in the area. Very convenient.