As I hinted in a semi-final post at True/Slant, this forum has found a new home, under a new name and with a new mission, at Forbes.

The assignment has changed, appropriate to the developing realities of the politics and economics of carbon. I’ll be pursuing green technology, its pioneers and their projects.

Please join me at  The Ingenuity of the Commons.

I hope that many of you who participated in this experiment at True/Slant will bring your curiosity, your vitality, and your expertise to the  dynamic, developing forum at Forbes. You’ll find many other True/Slant veterans there.

See what happens when digital innovation infuses legacy media. More than see: be the change.

Related articles

• So Long to the life we used to live (trueslant.com)

Emily. Image via Wikipedia

My old man taught me to say “so long” whenever we parted because he contended “goodbye” should be reserved for permanent occasions, like the one Emily Dickinson refers to here:

Good-by to the life I used to live,

And the world I used to know;

And kiss the hills for me, just once;

Now I am ready to go!

Goodbye seems especially ill suited for this occasion: while True/Slant writers and readers will scatter to diverse corners of cyberspace, that universe is nothing if not a network, and we will never be more than keystrokes apart.

It’s up to us to keep it going.

Nonetheless there is a passing to note here, an achievement to acknowledge, many thanks to be given.

My colleagues have written more ably and eloquently than I can of the community that thrived here, the conversations started, the friendships forged (I won’t name names, for fear of leaving one out–you know who you are).

I’ll focus on one particular accomplishment that still surprises me, happily, every time I log in.

When True/Slant came along the world needed (in addition to love) an economically viable way for readers and journalists to find one another and converse in civility.

In the end Forbes would testify to True/Slant’s economic viability, but right from the beginning True/Slant attained civility. For the most part, people here disagreed, as the saying goes, with all due respect. And without, as my colleague Caitlin Kelly said, trolls and flames.

In a comment on his own farewell post, my colleague Michael Humphrey says, “Perhaps civility will be the great legacy of T/S.”

But I believe True/Slant surpassed civility and attained a unique style of conversation better described as “collegiality.”

The difference is that we don’t just get along–that’s civility–but we trust one another. We have mutual respect and confidence in our ability and our intent.

That came to be the case not just among those who occupy True/Slant’s Mountain Lair, not just among the site’s 300 contributors, but most remarkably, among the million-plus readers who visited us each month and those who chose to return and comment.

This was a place where we knew one another to be in pursuit of the good, no matter how we might differ on the best way to get there. That’s why trolls and flames found neither purchase nor harbor here.

And this is no small achievement on my beat, which is harassed everywhere else by half-cocked skeptics. Skeptics brought their doubts to True/Slant, sure, but found they had to back them up. They had to be fully-cocked.

True/Slant’s community spanned the world, but was so coherent in its collegiality, it got so you could spot a newbie by his inappropriate bluster. It’s not hard to imagine a hypothetical True/Slanter, either commenter or contributor, who stumbles into town all roughed up by the wild ways of the world wide web, spewing sarcasm and snark and superiority, and finds that here it gets him nowhere.

He leaves in a cloud of frustration. But something draws him back, almost against his will, some scarcely definable allure in content and platform, and gradually he learns, as we all did, to disagree with all due respect.

Thank you colleagues, commenters, readers for the collegial conversation we have enjoyed. Let’s take it everywhere.

How was it achieved?

Collegiality took root in the technologies developed by Andrea Spiegel and Steve McNally and Roger Theriault, blossomed in the professionals selected by Coates Bateman and Lewis DVorkin, flourished under the hands-off leadership and hands-on assistance provided by all those people, plus editorial Jedi Master Michael Roston and our sherpas, Kashmir Hill and Katie Drummond.

Thank you, denizens of the Lair, for making this collegial conversation possible.

As many other writers before me have noted, here we were free to write. In freedom we turned to one another for examples, and we found some of the very best. They did what Emily Dickinson had long ago advised:

“Tell all the truth but tell it slant—”

So long, for now.

Image via Wikipedia

When today’s boomers, not to mention today’s pre-boomers (the new-chic word for geezer) were young, stress had not been invented. Oh, moms got frazzled with everything, dads (and occasionally moms too) came home bushed after a long hard day at the office, office buddies groused about too much work for too little pay – but nobody had figured out that Stress was messing with our lives.

Now we know.

Over on the PositScience site – this is a company that follows such things – Karen Merzenich reports on a Wired magazine article by Jonah Lehrer; it’s not online yet, but parts have been on Lehrer’s own blog. Lehrer has found, in talking with primatologist Robert Sapolsky, that stress is bad for one’s health even if one happens to be a baboon

Throughout decades of research studying baboon populations in Africa, Saposkly noticed that low social position created stress and poorer health in some of the baboons. Studies in humans have shown much the same thing. Specifically, things like having a mean boss or not having any control over your work contribute to a sustained stress response in your brain which negatively affects health and longevity. To paraphrase, Lehrer essentially says that stress doesn’t make you sick- but if you are sick, it will make it worse.

This news comes not long after an article in Psychology Today, by Howard Fillit M.D., about stress and its long-terms effects:

Over the course of a lifetime, the effects of chronic stress can accumulate and become a risk factor for cognitive decline and Alzheimer’s disease. Several studies have shown that stress, and particularly one’s individual way of reacting to stress (the propensity to become “dis-stressed” often found in neurotic people for example), increases the risk for Alzheimer’s disease.

For boomers, pre-boomers, elders and geezers, if stress has been accumulating all these years, it’s probably a good time to change. Perhaps, just chill out. Chilling out is something else that wasn’t invented until after stress was… but it is a handy response for these days.

Happy August from Boomers and Beyond.

Image by Lincolnian (Brian) via Flickr

Retirement village? Assisted living? Co-housing? Age-restricted or aging-in-place communities? Inter-generational cooperative? This space has explored many of the growing varieties of housing choices for boomers and elders when the time comes to downsize, rightsize, clear out or economize. Here’s a new one that’s making the news: think global.

Even with (and sometimes because of) today’s grim economy, increasing numbers of Americans are choosing senior housing overseas. Some are returning to former homes in countries with lower costs or better health care, some are finding bargain housing in inexpensive areas where they have friends or a support community.

But many are just making housing in another country life’s last great adventure.

According to Boomers Abroad, an ambitious online community/social network, the number of Americans and Canadians living abroad, already about 7 million, is expected to double and then some within the next 10 years — and you’re invited to join them. The site links to the top five locales listed in the just-released September/October issue of  AARP The Magazine the best of what Mexico, France, Panama, Portugal and Italy have to offer—”castles, palm trees, rain forests, grilled lobster—in their unique and unparalleled retirement experiences. ”

Columbus, Ohio. Image by SWolfeNI8W via Flickr

Well, hello, Columbus. ( Click here if you’re not a Philip Roth fan.)

Some people were surprised when Columbus, Ohio, appeared on the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) list of the top twenty-two energy “Smarter Cities,” sharing the spotlight with towns better known for their deep green glow. Places like Portland, Seattle, Boston and San Francisco.

One person who was not surprised was Michael Coleman, mayor of the city that in the 1990s still had the reputation as being just another bleak hole in the Midwestern Rust Belt. Coleman has led efforts to make Columbus a model of energy efficiency, one of the main priorities under a program called “Get Green Columbus.”

The program was already well underway when it received a huge boost from $7.4 million in federal stimulus funds. More than a score of city fire stations and several other city buildings are getting energy efficiency make overs. Businesses and homes are given incentives to lower energy consumption.

Well before the infusion of cash from Washington, Columbus had already completed its first energy efficient affordable housing, called, fittingly, Greenview Estates. The city also developed a recycling program, an initiative clean up air pollution and an infrastructure overhaul to ensure that residents had clean, safe water.

Energy efficiency has been at the core of the Columbus revitalization, however, which is why the NRDC included it as one of the 22 “Smarter Cities” for 2010.

The other cities, grouped by size are -

Large:

Austin, TX

Boston, MA

Chicago, IL

Columbus, Ohio

Dallas, TX

El Paso, TX

Long Beach, CA

New York, NY

Oakland, CA

Portland, OR

San Francisco, CA

Seattle, WA

Medium:

Berkeley, CA

Fort Collins, CO

Huntington Beach, CA

Reno, CA

Springfield, IL

Santa Clarita, CA

Small:

Beaverton, OR

Denton, TX

Dubuque, IA

Santa Cruz, CA

To lean more about how the NRDC picked these cities from among 655 considered, visit the Smarter Cities site.

A new study by researchers from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Cambridge University and the Karolinska Institute in Sweden has found that even light or moderate intensity physical activity, such as walking or cycling, can substantially reduced the risk of early death.

The study, published in the International Journal of Epidemiology, combined the results from the largest studies around the world on the health impact of light and moderate intensity physical activity. It showed that the largest health benefits from light or moderate activity (such as walking and cycling) were in people who do hardly any physical activity at all. Although more activity is better — the benefits of even a small amount of physical activity are very large in the least physically active.

The good news from this study is that you don’t have to be an exercise freak to benefit from physical activity. Just achieving the recommended levels of physical activity (equivalent to 30 minutes daily of moderate intensity activity on 5 days a week) reduces the risk of death by 19% [95%confidence interval 15% to 24%], while 7 hours per week of moderate activity (compared with no activity) reduces the risk of death by 24% (95% CI 19% to 29%).

(Of course, if you get off the raft and jog around the lake, the benefits rise. Who knows, there could be a further reduction in the risk of death, as long as you aren’t jogging in traffic. Over on his Coloradoan blog, senior runner Jon Sinclair points out that runners of a certain age — Sinclair introduced this writer to the “pre-boomer” designation — have been at it long enough to have proved this point: “Everyone stand up. All of you that began running after 1976 can sit down. Those that still are standing can smirk proudly at those sitting. I’m sure there aren’t many of you standing. For us ‘pre-boomers,’ or pbers, the current state of running is amazing and we should all feel happy about it.”)

But the best news of all, especially for those drawn to summertime laziness, is just in from the SportsGeezer. It is the suggestion that if you invite a bunch of friends to join you on the raft, possibly planning for cocktails and dinner later, you might do just as well skipping the walk/jog altogether:

More powerful than exercise, better than giving up smoking, extensive social networks have been shown to increase longevity by 50 percent. The Scientific American reports on research conducted at Brigham Young University that reviewed the results from 148 studies—which included a total of 308,849 participants—going back to the early 20th century. Most studies assessed survival in contrast to mortality from all causes. Sciam reports that the analysis also assessed what kind of studies best predict a person’s survival. Questionnaires that had asked participants at least a few in-depth questions about various social connections (such as, “To what extent are you participating or involved in your social network?” or “To what extent can you count on other people?”) were more effective at pinpointing a person’s overall risk of mortality from all causes than those that simply determined if a person was single or married or lived with at least one other person. The researchers found that when the questions delved deeper, complex social networks increased survival rates by 91 percent.

Prospects for a pleasant summer and a long life just went up.

The NOAA study drew on up to 11 different indicators of climate, and found that each one pointed to a world that was warming owing to the influence of greenhouse gases, said Peter Stott, head of climate monitoring at the UK’s Met Office, one of the agencies participating.

Seven indicators were rising, he said. These were: air temperature over land, sea-surface temperature, marine air temperature, sea level, ocean heat, humidity, and tropospheric temperature in the “active-weather” layer of the atmosphere closest to the earth’s surface. Four indicators were declining: Arctic sea ice, glaciers, spring snow cover in the northern hemisphere, and stratospheric temperatures.

Mr Stott said: “The whole of the climate system is acting in a way consistent with the effects of greenhouse gases.” “The fingerprints are clear,” he said. “The glaringly obvious explanation for this is warming from greenhouse gases.”

This is really bad news; not a single indicator contradicts the conclusion that we’re approaching a catastrophic tipping point. And it gets even worse.

Another newly released study has shown that phytoplankton, the basis of the ocean’s entire food chain, has declined over the past century by 40 percent.

The microscopic plants that support all life in the oceans are dying off at a dramatic rate, according to a study that has documented for the first time a disturbing and unprecedented change at the base of the marine food web.

Scientists have discovered that the phytoplankton of the oceans has declined by about 40 per cent over the past century, with much of the loss occurring since the 1950s. They believe the change is linked with rising sea temperatures and global warming.

Image via Wikipedia

While the national media are focused on Arizona because of the state’s controversial immigration law, there was virtually no coverage of a momentous leap in an area President Obama himself has declared “sexy.”

I’m talking about Arizona’s adoption, Tuesday, of a toughest-in-the-nation rule on energy efficiency.

The new rules require state-regulated utilities to cut the amount of electricity they sell 22 percent by the year 2020, through a variety of measures that help customers increase energy efficiency. These include rebates for insulating homes, planting shade trees, and buying more efficient air conditioners.

“This is huge,” says Jeff Schlegel, of the Southwest Energy Efficiency Project. “It puts Arizona in a leadership position in energy efficiency across the country.”

The rules, which still need to be approved by the state attorney general’s office, will save Arizona residents $9 billion in reduced utility bills over ten years, according to a study commissioned by SWEEP.

The Arizona Corporation Commission, which regulates utilities, voted 5-0 in favor of the measure last night.

ACC chairwoman Republican Kris Mayes, who as been called “a rock star” of the solar power movement for her past work making Arizona a leader in renewable energy production, told a local reporter she considers the energy efficiency measure “the most important thing I will ever do in my life.”

Fellow commissioner Democrat Paul Newman, in an email this morning, also stressed the importance of the new rule.

“EE [energy efficiency] is absolutely the cheapest way to reduce power costs, and carbon and toxic emission,” he wrote. “It’s an ambitious goal to be sure, but one that’s achievable and will force Arizona to pull out all the stops to reduce power use.”

Those comments were echoed by what might seem to be an unlikely source: APS, Arizona’s largest utility.

“APS is supportive of the new Energy Efficiency Standard,” said Jim Wontor, manager of the utility’s energy efficiency programs, in an email. “It is aggressive and challenging, but achievable.”

In addition to saving money for costumers, the new rule ultimately benefits the utility, wrote Wontor, by “reducing the cost to APS of meeting the increasing demand for electricity in the future.”

Not all utilities agree. Tucson Electric Power, for example, has objected to the measure it called unreasonable and costly.

SWEEP’s Jeff Schlegel, dismisses those claims. He points, instead, to additional benefits of the new rules:

“This will create 12,000 jobs, mostly in construction. It benefits consumers with lower electric bills, and it’s good for the environment.”

If the program is successful, Schlegel think the Arizona standard will spread to other states, and beyond.

“We hope,” he said, “that Arizona’s lead will have an impact on federal policy.”

Image by Getty Images Europe via @daylife

Tony Hayward is having a sad day.

You see, BP had to let their CEO go. Even the mutli-million dollar parachute his now-former employer slipped him at the door can’t assuage the pain of getting his life back. But Tony is trying his best to keep a stiff upper lip, in the best British tradition.

Whether his sacking is fair or unfair “is not the point,” he gamely told reporters today, before adding the purely philosophical observation that “life isn’t fair.”

Eschewing the kabuki ritual of publicly taking responsibility for what happened on his watch, Tony cowboyed-up (in his own way) and gave a bluntly honest assessment of what had transpired since that day in April when the Deepwater Horizon well exploded, killing eleven workers, flooding the Gulf of Mexico with a torrent of crude oil and nearly spoiling what had looked to be a promising yachting season.

“Sometimes,” Tony confessed, speaking of his own personal loss in being forced out, “you step off the pavement and get hit by a bus.”

And so, Tony Hayward exits the American stage as he entered it some 99 long days ago: an oily disaster.

Poor Tony. We knew thee well enough.

Mr Hayward, who will make way in October for US citizen and fellow board member Bob Dudley, told reporters he had no major regrets about his leadership of the group since 2007 and that his decision to leave was a purely practical one.

He said: “This is a very sad day for me personally. Whether it is fair or unfair is not the point. I became the public face (of the disaster) and was demonised and vilified. BP cannot move on in the US with me as its leader…”

via BP chief ‘demonised and vilified’ – Mid Sussex Today.

Image by Takver via Flickr

Passing climate-change legislation should have been a no-brainer. If our broken political system blocked a carbon-tax (even something as sensible as a carbon tax made revenue-neutral by tax swapping with something like reduced payroll taxes) then a market-based cap-and-trade system should have been a near unanimous choice. The science and economics are that clear.

Imagine it: conservative and progressive standing together and cheering; Mitch McConnell and Harry Reid joining hands surrounded by all the Senate grandchildren saying thank you. What a photo-op that would have been! America at it’s best.

Instead, we learned last week there won’t be any climate-change legislation getting through the Senate. Instead, we are going to continue slow-cooking the planet while falling further behind other nations who are moving towards sustainable energy futures.

This is an American failure so astoundingly stupid that it rendered the usually loquacious and sustainably optimistic Thomas Friedman speechless; he interrupted his own column titled “We’re going to be sorry” that had been bemoaning our inaction to say “I don’t have anything else to say.”

With a collective national failure as large and consequential as this we need to ask what the hell happened.

True. Even forget the lunacy of climate-change deniers, perhaps the most pernicious example of greed and cowardice is the ridiculous conservative notion that global warming is good because it will lower GDP marginally less than will a conversion to a sustainable energy economy.

But in addition to such greed and cowardice, planetary post-moterms can also find blame in the way our increasingly networked world can makes us, well, stupid. Networks magnify regardless of truth. Republican nay-sayers and their supporters are not all greedy cowards, many are simply victims. The unfortunate fact is that both the wisdom and the stupidity of crowds gets support from the content-apathy of networks: crap flows as freely as gold.

Every technology has unintended, and negative, consequences. Name a technology—internal combustion engines? nuclear power? genetic engineering? pharmacology?—and there are realized and potential downsides commensurate with the power to do good. No technology serves a free lunch. And magnified stupidity is a downside of a networked world.

For example, social network researchers like Christakis and Fowler have shown that networks are as good transmitting obesity, depression, and divorce as they are at distributing generosity, achievement, and empathy. Or consider last week’s story about Shirley Sherrod and Fox “News” racism. Content—crap or gold—doesn’t matter that much.

There are two main ways climate-crap has been made to flow through our information systems—including our connected brains.

The first is to pump a ton of crap into the network, and the oil companies have been pumping lots of it into our information systems. They pump crap as well as the oil we so greedily drink.

…look at the think tanks claiming that any effort to limit emissions would cripple the economy. Again and again, you’ll find that they’re on the receiving end of a pipeline of funding that starts with big energy companies, like Exxon Mobil, which has spent tens of millions of dollars promoting climate-change denial, or Koch Industries, which has been sponsoring anti-environmental organizations for two decades.

via Op-Ed Columnist – Who Cooked the Planet? – NYTimes.com.

Have you read about so-called “global cooling?” Or been made to question the scientific integrity of climate-change scientists but then not been given equal access to the eventual reports clearing them of any substantive wrong doing other than bad email manners? If yes, then you too are a victim of big energy companies spamming our networks.

The second way climate-crap efficiently enters our information systems is by exploiting so-called “super-connected” network nodes. A feature of a robust network is having some nodes with vastly more connections than average. These “super-connectors” are able to distribute information quickly and widely. Can you say Ashton Kushner? Regardless of quality, if you get yourself connected to a super-connector then regardless of what you have to say your voice will be heard. For good or bad.

WikiLeaks wisely dropped their cache of battle reports in the lap of the super-connected NY Times. But remember, a network doesn’t care if the information is crap or gold, even at the Times.  Consider the way conservative idealogues are able to exploit super-connected NY Times columnist Ross Douthat, someone already exposed as shamelessly trafficking in pseudo-science when it supports his conservative agenda. He again cherry-picks questionable data to conclude that the best course of action when it comes to global warming is to “wait, get richer, and then try to muddle through.”

The fact he’s spouting ideological nonsense will not diminish his super-connected influence. And nonsense is what he’s spouting. The idea that doing what we’ve always been doing is the same as wisely doing nothing is just stupid. Similarly, the Amercian conservative solution he trumpets is basically a decision to enslave millions of third-world workers living in climates that no longer support life as we know it so we can continue to live in excessively air-conditioned desert homes next to lavishly irrigated golf courses. Way to go American conservatives, you’ve helped kill the planet that nurtured civilization.

Maybe it’s time for an Iced Tea Party, or a Green Tea Party? We could have a very simple platform: no support for any candidate who doesn’t enthusiastically support simple, unadorned climate-change legislation. It’s past time we took back not just our country but our planet and our future.

Image by Getty Images via @daylife

The Holy Grail of the solar industry — reaching grid parity — may no longer be a distant dream. Solar power may have already reached that point, at least when compared to nuclear power, according to a new study by two researchers at Duke University.

It’s no secret that the cost of producing photovoltaic cells (PV) has been dropping for years. A PV system today costs just 50 percent of what it did in 1998.

Breakthroughs in technology and manufacturing combined with an increase in demand and production have caused the price of solar power to decline steadily. At the same time, estimated costs for building new nuclear power plants have ballooned.

The result of these trends: “In the past year, the lines have crossed in North Carolina,” say study authors John Blackburn and Sam Cunningham. “Electricity from new solar installations is now cheaper than electricity from proposed new nuclear plants.”

If the data analysis is correct, the pricing would represent the “Historic Crossover” claimed in the study’s title (pdf).

Two factors not stressed in the study further bolster the case for solar.

1) North Carolina is not a “sun-rich” state (pdf). The savings found in North Carolina are likely to be even greater for states with more sunshine –Arizona, southern California, Colorado, New Mexico, west Texas, Nevada and Utah.

2) The data include only PV-generated electricity, without factoring in what is likely the most encouraging development in solar technology: concentrating solar power (CSP). CSP promises utility scale production and solar thermal storage, making electrical generation practical for at least six hours after sunset.

Power costs are generally measured in cents per kilowatt hour – the cost of the electricity needed to illuminate a 1,000 watt light bulb (for example) for one hour. When the cost of a kilowatt hour (kWh) of solar power fell to 16 cents earlier this year, it “crossed over” the trend-line associated with nuclear power. (see chart below)

Chart by Blackburn and Cunningham, 2010

The authors point out that some commercial scale solar developers are now offering electricity at 14 cents a kWh in North Carolina, a price which is expected to continue to drop.

While the study includes subsidies for both solar and nuclear power, it estimates that if subsidies were removed from solar power, the crossover point would be delayed by a maximum of nine years.

The report is significant not only because it shows solar to be a cheaper source of energy than nuclear. The results are also important because, despite the Senate’s failure to pass a climate and energy bill this year, taxpayers now bear the burden of putting carbon into the atmosphere through a variety of hidden charges – or externalities, as economists call them. Fossil fuels currently account for 70 percent of the electricity generated in the U.S. annually. (Nuclear generates 20 percent.)

Having dropped below the cost of nuclear power, solar energy may now be one of the least expensive energy sources in America.

Somewhere along the way, BBC’s reporting goes from straight-up to funny, noting how likely Hayward successor Bob Dudley is more amenable to Americans on account of his lack of an Oxbridge accent. No, really:

The man expected to replace him, Bob Dudley, took over the day-to-day operations in the Gulf of Mexico last month.

Many say that, from a public relations point of view, Mr Dudley has the advantage of being American and speaking with an American accent.

He grew up in Mississippi and, according to BP, has a “deep appreciation and affinity for the Gulf Coast”.

via BBC News – BP chief Tony Hayward ‘negotiating exit deal’.

Ha, indeed, it’s the English accent that’s the problem! Check it out:

Because if “I’d like my life back” came out of the mouth of a southern-fried cracker, some son of Dixie, I’m sure people who were outraged about the potential environmental ruination of the Gulf of Mexico would just say, “aw shucks, BP, you guys just keep on trying to plug that hole, we don’t really need oysters or marine life or oil-free beaches.”

Meanwhile, back in the world of really bad news, reports appear to indicate that some crew on the Deepwater Horizon had bypassed certain safety functions in advance of the explosion that caused the spill. And the best bets appear to be that the leak will be sealed off only in mid-August.

In other words, BP would love to talk about anything other than how the effort to stop the spill is going! Smell ya later Tony Hayward!

Frieden, who also serves as Administrator of the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, is in a position to understand all this. A physician with training in internal medicine, infectious diseases, public health and epidemiology, he has spent the past several decades combating disease and advocating for preventive measures across the U.S. and around the world. He took over as head of CDC in June, 2009.

Speaking to an audience of health professionals and community members at San Francisco’s Commonwealth Club recently, Frieden launched his remarks with a story of treating one patient, a few years ago, who had multi-drug resistant tuberculosis (TB is on the rise these days.) Cost of treatment? Over $100,000. Cost of prevention, had this one man been vaccinated? $10.

High on the list of largely preventable diseases, Frieden said, is cardiovascular disease. Simple measures like quitting smoking, cutting down on (or eliminating) trans fats and losing weight would lead to huge reductions in expenditures on treatment of cardiovascular disease, not to mention longer, healthier lives. He also cited the $200 billion cost of tobacco-related disease, which currently claims some 1200 lives per day.

Other preventable health care costs come from teen pregnancy and motor vehicle accidents, Frieden said, citing the dollars that are saved when these don’t happen. But he came down hardest on obesity. “It is epidemic in the U.S.,” he said. “And in the next 30 years obesity is expected to double in adults and triple among children.”

One audience question (OK, it was submitted by this writer/agitator) went unanswered in the Q&A session following the talk: How can the exorbitant costs invested in often-futile end-of-life treatment be reduced? But that question may have been buried in the substantial pile of other questions posed in relation to the above, and other issues such as:

Can CDC spread some money around to states and local governments for health care? “In a word, no.” And what about the catastrophic Deepwater Horizon oil spill? Its effects will be with us for a long time, Frieden said, but CDC’s primary concern right now is with health and safety of workers and others on the scene. CDC is involved with a number of other agencies addressing the human and environmental impacts of the disaster.

The event was introduced by California HealthCare Foundation Director of the Chronic Disease Care Program Sophia Chang, and moderated by University of California San Francisco Chancellor Emeritus and Global Health Institute Director Haile Debas.

On the good news side — which was a slim side of the room, no pun intended — Frieden cited progress in efforts to promote biking and walking as an alternative to the automobile (currently costing $4 million in emergency room visits and $200 billion overall annual costs; “$12 billion could be saved by seat belts”) and in HIV prevention (treatment for one person: $400,000; cost of a condom, five cents.)

This reporter stood briefly at the back of the near-capacity crowd before the talk started and counted 24 audience members who would qualify as obese. It’s easy to feel righteous when you’ve never had a major weight problem and you got to the event on foot and on Muni bus. It’s hard to feel unsympathetic when you can’t seem to lose those 3 or 4 pounds you could really do without, when you smell the french fries while passing every fast food joint on Market Street and you know how many people don’t have access to good public transportation.

Public health is, indeed a public problem. Dr. Frieden has his work cut out for him.

Image by AFP via @daylife

Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner made its overseas debut last week, and, by all accounts, was a smashing success. At the Farnborough Air Show in the United Kingdom, the Dreamliner was the Grand Dame of the show. (It easily outshone the hideous “airplane by committee” monstrosity that is the Airbus A380.) There are now over 800 787s on order.

It’s easy to see why the Dreamliner has proved so commercially successful. No airplane is more environmentally-friendly: those worried about greenhouse gas emissions will be pleased to learn that the 787 is 20 to 30 percent more fuel efficient than the Airbus A330 and the Boeing 767, its closest cousins. The airlines, always looking for ways to cut costs, are obviously over the moon – or, at least, over 33,000 feet – at these potential cost savings. The airplane itself, by the way, is an aesthetic marvel. I recently toured the Boeing factory in Everett, Washington, and saw the graceful bird firsthand. It’s nothing short of astounding.

Cars are similarly undergoing a revolution in fuel efficiency and “greening.” The Nissan Leaf, a zero emissions car, will be available by the end of this year. Chevrolet’s Volt, another electric car, will be on the market by November, and Honda has recently announced its intention to get into the electric car market.

And so those two “scourges” of the earth, those toxic belchers of greenhouse gas emissions, cars and airplanes, are becoming more and more environmentally friendly. Progress, right? Something to celebrate, yes? But why is it, then, that even as this revolution is happening, the environmental elites become ever more committed to limiting our mobility? Why, as transportation becomes greener, do they become redder and redder with rage?

Consider, first, civil aviation. Even as the 787 looks set to radically reduce the environmental impact of flying, environmental and governmental elites are attempting ever more aggressively to prevent us from taking to the skies. The Obama Administration has been breathtakingly hostile to the airline industry, slapping needless fees and surcharges on the industry. The United Kingdom has recently declared war on aviation, and likened frequent flying to drug abuse. The German government is also now looking to ground its flying public. And flyers are increasingly subjected to moral hectoring from the greener-than-thou among us.

Hostility to cars, especially in urban areas, has also reached a fever pitch. The very trendy Slate magazine has recently been running a series on how to “improve” urban transport. All of the suggestions center on ways to reduce car use. Congestion pricing, the highly regressive measure that penalizes people for driving in their own cities, is an idea we often hear bandied about. And cities like my own continue to pour dollars into public transportation projects, while neglecting to fund the construction of roads, highways, and bridges.

It would appear, then, that environmentalists’ concerns over flying and driving don’t actually have much to do with the Earth. Perhaps its an aesthetic dislike of cars and planes, a hatred of man’s supposed “hubris” for daring, Icaraus-like, to fly, or maybe it’s simply a deep-seated distrust of modernity that explains the continued war on freedom of movement. In a way, it’s temping to feel sympathy for the environmental movement. After all, in a world where transportation is becoming increasingly environmentally friendly, it’s not easy being green.

UPDATE: I edited this post to correct a typo in the initial version. Many thanks to commenter ‘Zach Hensel’ for pointing this out.

Image via Wikipedia

Rounding a bend in the road around a local airport the other day, I glanced to the left and saw a cop sitting in the grass off the pavement. The white SUV was easy to see. The guy wasn’t trying to hide, but he didn’t need to because people love to come whipping around this particular stretch of road — it lends itself to speeding — and probably a few of them can’t slow down soon enough and shoot past the cop’s position.

As I passed him, however, I was struck by a very depressing thought: The day is coming when your car — your very own, much loved member-of-your-family automobile —  is going to fink on you, rat you out, and otherwise get you in trouble.

Oh, yeah. Because eventually cars will have a communication system that by law will have to be able to communicate with the police. This will be factory-installed in the name of safety. It will amount to this: You’ll pass by a cop’s location, and your car will tell the laptop in his car how fast you’re going.

Don’t think so? Live long enough, you’ll get to enjoy this and much more. Rental car companies are already letting subcontractors spy on you and fine you. Retailers are tagging their crappy clothes so that they can track your movements and spending habits. A respected American aircraft manufacturer, maker of one of the aeronautic icons of WWII, is proud to offer a high-altitude, long-flying spy drone that will undoubtedly spy on Americans. I’ve already written a post about the day when the Earthly landscape itself spies on you using “smart dust.”

I hate all this because I’m getting intensely beleaguered of being observed, tracked, and otherwise spied upon in “the Land of the Free.” I must point out, however, that at times I submit voluntarily to observation either because I simply can’t get around it, or a desired activity results in observation.

This blog and also my Facebook profile are examples of that voluntary action. Search engines survey the words I use in blog posts, and advertising related to the concepts of those words pops up on Beaufinn now and then. Some months ago when I wrote about wild boars in Germany, an ad for boar hunting in America appeared on my site.

As for Facebook, we all fell for it, really, including me. We unnecessarily gave away a ton of personal information, and that site is now obviously all about watching and monitoring people and their activity, and trying to sell stuff to them. I no longer post photos to my Facebook profile, and comment minimally on my own activities, because I find it akin to reporting on myself to both the world and also to a hidden authority about which I get to know nothing.

Privacy has become a commodity, and I’m starting to invest more and more, or at least try.

As for that idea about your car ratting you out to the cops, that’s not entirely about privacy, because if you’re just +2 mph over the limit, you’re doing that in public. What’s wrong with that is the passivity of it — that my machine, not I, files a report that I wouldn’t deign to file. The person is in charge of the machine, or should be. My car shouldn’t be making phone calls that I didn’t dial or wouldn’t dial.

Is it all about safety and peace of mind? Will we feel wonderfully secure in a world where our cars are talking to the other cars and regulating their speed together while we, in our GPS-tracked, holographic clothes, can spend the drive to work already doing work using our cranially implanted PDAs? While overhead, the drones know exactly who’s where, what they had for breakfast, how much they weigh, their blood sugar and heart-rate, and if they’re pregnant or not?

At lunch, you take a walk, and the genetically modified trees can detect the skin cells you shed. They record your presence in an embedded chip.

Oh, yes — trees will be computerized in the future.

I just wonder: How soon?

Image via Wikipedia

The Senate’s abandonment of climate legislation, confirmed last night, is not a victory of Republicans over Democrats, business over government, skeptics over believers. It’s a failure of capitalism, above all, and a failure of capitalism’s apprentice: democracy.

In facing global warming, human beings have faced the unprecedented necessity–and the unprecedented possibility–of changing our collective behavior through our collective will.

We didn’t attempt to do it through imperial fiat, totalitarian dictate, One World Order — we attempted to do it through the most powerful engine of change known to modern time, and only after taking a vote.

Capitalism has marched across the last two centuries undeterred by world wars, by massive economic collapses, by the rise and fall of rival ideologies sporting massive armies toting lethal arsenals, by unimagined technological innovation, by profound shifts in what we know, what we believe, and what we can do.

Through all of this it has continued to chug along, from steam engines to microprocessors, puff puff puffing from its chimney.

What other force can chill out an overheating planet? Not only does it have the power, it has the smokestacks.

The climate bill was not anti-capitalist: it would have created a new market. It was not anti-business: it had been endorsed by every major business that would be affected by it. It was not a tax: it was an opportunity to make a new kind of profit.

It was not undemocratic: and that may have been its undoing.

It was a small-d democratic attempt to steer the power of the markets to effect global change, not in the name of any utopian ideal, unless in this cynical age survival has become the utopian ideal.

It was capitalist, democratic, and necessary, and in America’s upper legislative body, that august chamber of powdery old rich men and women, it failed.

This failure, the one announced last night, is the failure that counts. Copenhagen failed to live up to the world’s hopes and expectations, but at the end of the meetings in Copenhagen more real possibility existed than had existed before. Real financial commitments had been made, real alliances had formed across ideologies, a real path had been charted, if only roughly.

All that was needed was for the United States to step up and make a measley 17 percent reduction in its carbon output, to show the world that it could harness the power that had created this problem in order to solve it.

This is the failure that counts: the failure of the United States, which has produced most of the world’s existing greenhouse gas pollution. The failure, in particular, of the United States Senate, so resistant to change it would sooner risk the climate than do anything risky.

This is the failure of individual senators like South Carolina’s Lindsey Graham, who promised to support the bill three times and broke that promise at least that many times, in the end using BP’s oil spill disaster as an excuse to do nothing about the disaster of oil.

And this is the failure, in some way, of 99 others just like him.

The Democrats needed one Republican vote, but in the end, said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, they could not find one. Those fatcat Republicans make nice scapegoats, best roasted on a spit, but a political choice was made in 57 cold Democratic hearts as well, now relieved not to have to fight this uncertain battle in an election year.

This is not a partisan failure. It’s too big for that. A scalding future will not look back on 2010 and blame the 41 Republicans in the Senate.

Those terribly uncomfortable future humans wandering their dismal, apocalyptic scorched earth, alone but for the company of cockroaches and flies, as they gather around the few remaining mud holes, will blame our era, our system, our inability to control ourselves, our inability to act at will for the common and the future good.

They will scoff at our naivete, our preposterous notion that freedom equates to handing power to a tiny cabal of obscenely wealthy eogists who couldn’t be bothered to save the planet.

They’ll blame us. “Idiots!” they’ll say. And then they’ll die. And with cockroaches in stewardship, the earth will recover.

Andrew Revkin says some of the blame for the failure to address climate change has to lie with the President: With No Obama Push, Senate Punts on Climate.

Remember when our Julia Ioffe picked up the Russian media that was suggesting that America might want to take a page from the Soviet Union’s history books and nuke the site of the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to cut off the oil spill once and for all?

That was some fun Internet times. But back in reality, we have some indications that it is actually a terrible idea. In 1969, as part of its program of ‘peaceful nuclear explosions’, the government exploded a large nuclear bomb 8,000 feet below a mountain near Parachute, Colorado. They were trying to liberate natural gas, but all they ended up doing was irradiating it. And now oil companies want to try drilling again, and locals are not happy according to Catherine Tsai at the AP:

Four decades later, energy companies are drilling near the nuclear site as they look to tap Colorado’s lucrative oil and gas reserves. Some local residents say they don’t trust the industry after what happened here and in the Gulf of Mexico during the oil spill. They’re fearful that accidents could pollute the air with radioactive gas if drilling gets much closer.

“I’m not 100 percent sure that the gas industry or the oil industry is careful enough, or has enough plans in place, that if something happens like the oil spill that I would be safe,” said Parachute Town Trustee Judith Hayward, who owns half the mineral rights in a 40-acre no-drill zone at the site of the nuclear experiment.

Locals are also quick to mock the idea floated during the Gulf oil spill to close the breached well with a nuclear bomb. Engineers tried a nuke in the course of energy exploration here, and it didn’t turn out as expected.

via News from The Associated Press.

Funny: the Soviets used nukes to close off oil and gas leaks, we used nukes to secure oil and gas supplies. Communism vs. capitalism defined!

(Nevermind, I’m sure the Soviets used nukes for oil and gas exploration, too. Then again, the Soviets used nukes when they had trouble uncorking a bottle of vodka…)

More seriously, it’s worth considering that no mind was ever paid to environmental issues by the Soviet Union. The natural world they controlled was meant only to serve the Soviet people (or its military). That’s how they dried up entire lakes and created such gnarly genetic disorders for some of their people. We made our own tries at it, but we backed off when we realized the danger it exposed our natural environment to (sadly, this also meant we outsourced a lot of our nuke testing to the South Pacific).

Anyways, it seems to me that any idea that makes us more like the Soviet Union, well, those ideas aren’t really good ones, are they? And this article only goes to prove the point. Officials say that a disaster of the type imagined by locals is unlikely. That’s what they said about the Deepwater Horizon going down, too.