Because I know Salon readers are still having sleepless nights wondering whether owning a Labrador Retriever does as much damage to the earth as owning an SUV, I thought I would pass on this entertaining debunking of the numbers involved, put together by Clark Williams-Derry at Sightline Daily.
Derry concludes that the authors of "Time to Eat the Dog: The Real Guide to Sustainable Living" underestimate the carbon footprint of SUVs and way overestimate the carbon footprint of dog food. His bottom line, "the anti-doggites are off by a factor of at least 18, and probably more."
Derry's make a convincing case all along the numbers-chain, especially when it comes to breaking down the dog food issue.
The anti-doggists estimate it takes .84 hectares -- or about 2.1 acres of cropland -- to meet a a pooch's food needs for a year. There are a little over 70 million dogs in the U.S. (the Humane Society says 74.8 million, the veterinarians say 72.1 million, and the pet food industry says 66.3 million, for an average of 71.1 dogs). So by the authors' estimates it must take about 150 million acres of U.S. farmland to feed our dogs. In all, there are 440 million acres of cropland in the US -- suggesting that the equivalent of one-third of all U.S. cropland is devoted to producing dog food.
Williams-Derry argues that the notion that 1/3 of all U.S. cropland goes to dog food is ridiculous, particularly when you look at how big a part dog food plays in the overall food economy.
Total retail food sales in the U.S. topped $1.1 trillion in the US in 2008 (see table 36 from the USDA's Agricultural Outlook statistics.) But according to the pet food industry, retail dog food sales totaled just $11 billion in 2008. By that measure, dog food represents about one percent of the total food economy.
There's more at the source, if you still need convincing.
That the U.S. would experience a top-line unemployment rate of over 10 percent before the end of 2009 was something most observers of the economy could see coming six months ago, if not earlier. Which makes the somewhat overwrought response to today's admittedly bad numbers a little unexpected.
Megan McArdle titles her post "America and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Jobs Numbers." Felix Salmon ponders "A Global Problem with No Solution." Paul Krugman has "got a sick feeling about the whole situation."
I don't want to sugarcoat anything. Calculated Risk and The Big Picture have oodles of "butt ugly" charts and graphs that make it abundantly clear that the current labor picture is as bad as anything Americans have seen since the Great Depression. I myself was moaning about the lack of jobs as recently as last Thursday. It's miserable out there.
But as readers were quick to remind me last week, unemployment is a lagging indicator. We have known all year that the unemployment rate would likely rise steadily throughout the year. Let's remind ourselves again that the rate at which the economy is shedding jobs is slowing. That's a good thing. The point at which it would be time to cry out in despair that the world is ending would be if the rate of job loss started growing again -- a sign of the dreaded double dip recession.
Paul Krugman is repeating his usual refrain: Obama should have pushed for a bigger stimulus at the beginning. Perhaps, in the most Rooseveltian of all possible worlds, he could have come into office and immediately orchestrated a massive WPA-like jobs program. But even if one accepts the rather unlikely possibility that Obama could have pushed through a budget deficit even larger than the $1.4 trillion we are currently looking at, I think there's good reason to believe that it would have been very difficult to materially alter the shape of the unemployment curve in the first nine months of the presidency. Remember, Obama came into office at the absolute height of the crisis -- the shock to the economy that hit a year ago had barely begun to work its way through its system.
There are definitely some bad future scenarios lying in wait. One possibility is that high unemployment next year leads to a Republican takeover of the House, and complete government paralysis ensues. Then we might find out for sure what happens when the government does not stimulate an economy as sick as ours. That is an experiment I am not looking forward to. But for the moment, we do have a White House committed to fiscal stimulus, even if it is operating under budgetary constraints -- not of its own making -- that severely reduce its freedom of action.
The numbers are bad, sure. But they could be worse, and they might get better. For the sake of all our animal spirits, let's not despair.
On Monday, the City of Berkeley announced it had received a $108,500 grant "for the purpose of spurring the adoption of solar installations" as part of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Berkeley plans to split the grant between two existing programs, "the SmartSolar and Berkeley Solar Map projects."
SmartSolar offers "free energy efficiency and solar advising to Berkeley property owners."
The Berkeley SolarMap is even neater -- a very cool application that takes advantage of the capabilities of Google Maps, and allows you to quickly calculate the cost of a solar system for your home. In just a few minutes, I inputted a years worth of PG&E data on my gas and electricity expenses into Berkeley SolarMap's online calculator, plugged in my address so that system could estimate my available roof square footage from satellite photos, and ended up with an estimate for how much a system would cost and how much I would save on electricity (and how many pounds of carbon dioxide I would no longer be responsible for emitting).
That was the fun part. The not so fun part was that Berkeley SolarMap estimated the total cost of a system that would pay for 100 percent of my electricity needs at $27,000. Ouch. Sure, after after 25 years I would net out at zero, but that's still a little bit too long a time frame for me at the moment. I'm going to have to wait until Berkeley's solar power system financing plan expands.
Even though I have not yet been spurred to take advantage of the program, I'm still happy that stimulus money is helping to pay the wages of people creating these programs and doing the solar power consulting. Those are tax dollars spent that I do not regret one whit.
It's only fair. Last week, HTWW was mean to Citigroup's former CEO, John Reed, after he acknowledged in a letter to the New York Times that maybe repealing Glass-Steagall's separation of commercial and investment banking activities hadn't been such a great idea. Since Reed was instrumental in forcing the law's repeal, his change of heart seemed to fit squarely in the "way too little, way too late" category.
But Bloomberg's Bob Ivry tracked Reed down and got the CEO on record with an explicit apology, in "Reed Apologizes for Glass Steagall Repeal, Building Citigroup":
"I'm sorry," Reed, 70, said in an interview yesterday. "These are people I love and care about. You could imagine emotionally it's not easy to see what's happened."
...Lawmakers were wrong to repeal the Depression-era Glass- Steagall Act in 1999, Reed said. At the time, he supported overturn of the law, which required the separation of institutions that engaged in traditional customer banking services from those involved in capital markets.
"We learn from our mistakes... When you're running a company you do what you think is right for the stockholders. Right now I'm looking at this as a citizen."
While other bankers are running around trying to defend the Christianity of profit-seeking, and the banking industry as a whole is fighting tooth and nail against any regulatory reform, here's one former executive willing to apologize and admit error. It's refreshing, and worth applause.
By any normal standard, there is no doubt that the government's unemployment report for October is grim. The unemployment rate jumped up to 10.2 percent and there are 15.7 million unemployed Americans. The headline writers and politicians will grab those numbers and won't let go.
The broadest measure of unemployment, the so-called U-6 number that measures "total unemployed, plus all marginally attached workers, plus total employed part time" also rose, from 16.1 percent to 16.3 percent.
But the news isn't all bad. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that it revised down significantly the number of jobs lost in August from 201,000 to 154,000, and in September from 263,000 to 219,000. That means;
In the most recent 3 months, job losses have averaged 188,000 per month, compared with losses averaging 357,000 during the prior 3 months. In contrast, losses averaged 645,000 per month from November 2008 to April 2009.
Going from an average of 645,000 jobs lost a month to 188,000 is a sign of an improving labor market, even if the improvement is only from absolutely horrific to merely awful.
Manna from heaven for the climate skeptic brigade: A British judge has ruled that a man can sue his employer for unlawfully termination based on his "green views" on the grounds that environmental beliefs deserve the same legal protection as religious or philosophical beliefs.
The case is complicated, but not for those who believe human-caused global warming is a hoax, and that environmentalists who urge action restricting greenhouse gas emissions are just trying to impose their anti-capitalist Marxist agenda on society. They are cheering: See, we told you global warming was a religion!
The backstory: Tim Nicholson, head of "sustainability" for the property firm Grainger PLC, says he was attempting to come up with a "carbon management" program for the company, but couldn't get Grainger to give him the necessary information to determine the firm's carbon footprint. He claims he was eventually fired because of his belief that action needed to be taken to stop global warming. Grainger contends that "that Mr Nicholson's redundancy was driven solely by the operational needs of the company during a period of extraordinary market turbulence."
In 2003, the UK enacted a law that prohibits discrimination against employees for "religious or philosophical beliefs." In his ruling, Justice Michael Burton declared that "a belief in man-made climate change ... is capable, if genuinely held, of being a philosophical belief for the purpose of the 2003 Religion and Belief Regulations".
Oddly, Grainger's lawyer had been arguing, reports the Daily Telegraph, "that adherence to climate change theory was 'a scientific view rather than a philosophical one,' because 'philosophy deals with matters that are not capable of scientific proof.'" Which would seem to be saying that it would be OK to discriminate against an employee for views based on science, but not on religion or philosophy. Which is just plain weird.
Nicholson's own reaction to the verdict seems nuanced and reasonably clear-headed.
I'm delighted by the judgment, not only for myself but also for other people who may feel they are discriminated against for their belief in man-made climate change. This is a huge issue and the moral and ethical values that I have in relation to the imperative to do something about it, but crucially underpinned by the overwhelming scientific consensus, mean that to have secured protection in this way is, I think, a landmark decision ... It's a philosophical belief based on my moral and ethical values underpinned by scientific evidence and that's the distinction [with it being a religious belief] I think. The moral and ethical values are similar to those that are promoted and adopted by many of the world's religions. But one of the key differences I think is that mine is not a faith-based or spiritual-based belief: it is grounded in the overwhelming scientific evidence and it's the combination of that scientific evidence with the moral and ethical imperative to do something about it that is distinct from a religion.
But who's got time for nuance? Belief in global warming is now officially a religion is the shorter takeaway for the climate skeptics. I expect to hear Senator James Inhofe declaiming on this topic before the week is done.
An interesting sideline to this case. Justice Michael Burton, reports the Daily Telegraph, is the same judge "who last year ruled that the environmental documentary An Inconvenient Truth by Al Gore was political and partisan."
The Telegraph grossly misrepresents Burton's 2007 ruling. A parent had been trying to stop "An Inconvenient Truth" from being distributed by the Department of Education to secondary schools. Burton declined to do so, calling the film "broadly accurate." He did, however, enumerate nine errors that he said he had found in the documentary and that teachers should be aware of.
Whether or not Burton's citations were truly "errors" has been contested. But I was intrigued to see that one of the supposed errors, in Burton's view, was that "the receding snows of Kilimanjaro are due to global warming." Burton declared that "the scientific consensus is that it cannot be established that the recession of snows on Mt Kilimanjaro is mainly attributable to human-induced climate change."
Well guess what? Just this week, a new study appearing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences documented that "the melting on Kilimanjaro is accelerating and that in a few years there may be no ice left."
The lead author of the study, Lonnie Thompson, said that the scientists looked at ice cores from the glacier covering the top of Kilimanjaro that "represent almost 12,000 years of history, since the glaciers first formed on Kilimanjaro," and that "the top, most recent layer shows evidence of melting and refreezing, in the form of elongated air bubbles -- a pattern that is not seen at any other time in the glaciers' history.
"So in the 11,700-year history, we don't find that type of melting having been preserved, and it would be preserved and you should be able to see it in the bubble structure," he said in an interview.
Sounds like bad juju to me. The spirits are angry. Maybe it's time to start praying. Or at least cut back on our greenhouse gas emissions.
A conversation about globalization.
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