Tag Archives: United States

POLITICS: Did Republican shenanigans result in the United States’ credit downgrade?

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It appears that the manner in which the Republicans steered or conducted the debt-ceiling debate, or given the fact that Republicans refuse to end the crippling Bush tax cuts or implement measures to raise revenue for the U.S. government, resulted in the United States’ credit downgrade by Standard & Poor’s. Also, the Republican Party’s refusal to work with President Obama, or consider his policies, has certainly played a part in the overall uneasy attitude towards Congress regarding its inability to manage the U.S. economy, to implement policies to spur job growth, or to implement legislation to curb the United States’ debt. Also, the Tea Party, through it’s influence and inability to grasp the important role that government is supposed to play in managing the well-being of society, has been a major factor in generating political insanity and economic uncertainty. Via NationalJournal.com:

The big new element on Friday was an official outside recognition that U.S. creditworthiness is being undermined by a new factor: political insanity. S&P didn’t base its downgrade on a change in the U.S. fiscal and economic outlook. It based it on the political game of chicken over the debt ceiling, a game that Republicans initiated and pushed to the limit, and on a growing gloom about the partisan deadlock.   Part of S&P’s gloom, moreover, stemmed explicitly from what a new assessment of the GOP’s ability to block any and all tax increases.

S&P was remarkably blunt that its downgrade was mostly about heightened political risks:  “The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America’s governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed,” it said.

(TEXT: Politicians React to Downgrade)

“The statutory debt ceiling and the threat of default have become political bargaining chips in the debate over fiscal policy. Despite this year’s wide-ranging debate, in our view, the differences between political parties have proven to be extraordinarily difficult to bridge, and, as we see it, the resulting agreement fell well short of the comprehensive fiscal consolidation program that some proponents had envisaged until quite recently.”

To be sure, S&P didn’t specifically single out Republicans. It criticized the overall $2.4 trillion deal as too limited, and it implicitly criticized both political parties for refusing to tackle their sacred cows – entitlements, in the case of Democrats; tax increases in the case of Republicans.

But it’s hard to read the S&P analysis as anything other than a blast at Republicans.  In denouncing the threat of default as a “bargaining chip,” the agency was saying that the GOP strategy had shaken its confidence.  Though S&P didn’t mention it, the agency must have been unnerved by the number of Republicans who insisted that it would be fine to blow through the debt ceiling and provoke a default.

As many other analysts have noted, the deficit-reduction deal wouldn’t stop debt from climbing faster than the nation’s GDP over the next decade.   It warned that the government’s publicly-held debt would climb from 74 percent of GDP at the end of this year to 79 percent by the end of 2011.

But one reason S&P said it had become more gloomy was that it had revised its assumptions about the most likely course of fiscal policy. In previous projections, it said, its “base case scenario” had assumed that Bush tax cuts for the wealthy would expire at the end of 2012, while tax cuts for families earning less than $250,000 a year would be extended.  That, it said, would have reduced deficits about $950 billion over ten years.

But the new S&P base case assumes that Congress extends all the Bush tax cuts.   “We have changed our assumption on this because the majority of Republicans in Congress continue to resist any measure that would raise revenues, a position we believe Congress reinforced by passing the act,” S&P said.

WILDLIFE: Are wild horses native to the U.S.?

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Both images are via Jeffrey K. Edwards on Flickr and can be found here and here.


The Bureau of Land Management, or BLM, is being challenged on its view that wild horses aren’t native to the United States. The argument rests on biology and not history. It is being argued that the wild horses, currently roaming the West, are genetically the same horses that roamed the West thousands of years before. Therefore, proponents of this view argue that wild horses should be managed as native wildlife and not as “‘feral weeds’ [or] barnyard escapees.”  According to one advocate of this view, “‘The Spanish [merely brought] them home.’” More via the San Francisco Chronicle:

The group In Defense of Animals and others are pressing a case in the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals that maintains wild horses roamed the West about 1.5 million years ago and didn’t disappear until as recently as 7,600 years ago. More importantly, they say, a growing stockpile of DNA evidence shows conclusively that today’s horses are genetically linked to those ancient ancestors.

The new way of thinking could carry significant ramifications across hundreds millions of acres in the West where the U.S. Bureau of Land Management divides up livestock grazing allotments based partly on the belief the horses are no more native to those lands than are the cattle brought to North America centuries ago.

Rachel Fazio, a lawyer for the plaintiffs, told a three-judge appellate panel in San Francisco earlier this year that the horses are “an integral part of the environment.”

“As much as the BLM would like to see them as not, they are actually a native species. They are tied to this land,” she said. “There would not be a horse but for North America. Every single evolutionary iteration of the horse is found here and only here.”

Judge Mary Schroeder, former chief of the circuit, asked: “Just like polar bears?”

“Yes,” Fazio answered, “they belong there.”

.       .       .

“This isn’t about history, it’s about biology,’ Kirkpatrick said. “The Spanish were bringing them home.”

.       .       .

Kirkpatrick said Europe’s domestication of the horse over about 6,000 years may have changed the nuclear makeup of some genes but “it remains the same species and retains the same social organization and social behaviors that evolved over 1.4 million years.”

Continue reading this article at the San Francisco Chronicle. More on research that suggests wild horses should be managed as native wildlife via Jay F. Kirkpatrick, Ph.D. and Patricia M. Fazio, Ph.D. (emphasis added):

A study conducted at the Ancient Biomolecules Centre of Oxford University (Weinstock et al. 2005) also corroborates the conclusions of Forstén (1992). Despite a great deal of variability in the size of the Pleistocene equids from differing locations (mostly ecomorphotypes), the DNA evidence strongly suggests that all of the large and small caballine samples belonged to the same species. The author states, “The presence of a morphologically variable caballine species widely distributed both north and south of the North American ice sheets raises the tantalizing possibility that, in spite of many taxa named on morphological grounds, most or even all North American caballines were members of the same species.”

In another study, Kruger et al. (2005), using microsatellite data, confirms the work of Forstén (1992) but gives a wider range for the emergence of the caballoid horse, of 0.86 to 2.3 million years ago. At the latest, however, that still places the caballoid horse in North America 860,000 years ago. 5 The work of Hofreiter et al. (2001), examining the genetics of the so-called E. lambei from the permafrost of Alaska, found that the variation was within that of modern horses, which translates into E. lambei actually being E. caballus, genetically. The molecular biology evidence is incontrovertible and indisputable, but it is also supported by the interpretation of the fossil record, as well.

Finally, very recent work (Orlando et al. 2009) that examined the evolutionary history of a variety of non‐caballine equids across four continents, found evidence for taxonomic “oversplitting” from species to generic levels. This overspitting was based primarily on late‐Pleistocene fossil remains without the benefit of molecular data. A co‐author of this study, Dr. Alan Cooper, of the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA, stated, “Overall, the new genetic results suggest that we have underestimated how much a single species can vary over time and space, and mistakenly assumed more diversity among extinct species of megafauna.”

The fact that horses were domesticated before they were reintroduced matters little from a biological viewpoint. They are the same species that originated here, and whether or not they were domesticated is quite irrelevant. Domestication altered little biology, and we can see that in the phenomenon called “going wild,” where wild horses revert to ancient behavioral patterns. Feist and McCullough (1976) dubbed this “social conservation” in his paper on behavior patterns and communication in the Pryor Mountain wild horses. The reemergence of primitive behaviors, resembling those of the plains zebra, indicated to him the shallowness of domestication in horses.

The issue of feralization and the use of the word “feral” is a human construct that has little biological meaning except in transitory behavior, usually forced on the animal in some manner. Consider this parallel. E. Przewalskii (Mongolian wild horse) disappeared from Mongolia a hundred years ago. It has survived since then in zoos. That is not domestication in the classic sense, but it is captivity, with keepers providing food and veterinarians providing health care. Then they were released during the 1990s and now repopulate their native range in Mongolia. Are they a reintroduced native species or not? And what is the difference between them and E. caballus in North America, except for the time frame and degree of captivity?

The key element in describing an animal as a native species is (1) where it originated; and (2) whether or not it co‐evolved with its habitat. Clearly, E. caballus did both, here in North American. There might be arguments about “breeds,” but there are no scientific grounds for arguments about “species.”

The non‐native, feral, and exotic designations given by agencies are not merely reflections of their failure to understand modern science but also a reflection of their desire to preserve old ways of thinking to keep alive the conflict between a species (wild horses), with no economic value anymore (by law), and the economic value of commercial livestock.

Native status for wild horses would place these animals, under law, within a new category for management considerations. As a form of wildlife, embedded with wildness, ancient behavioral patterns, and the morphology and biology of a sensitive prey species, they may finally be released from the “livestock‐gone‐loose” appellation.

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The author or licensor of these images does not endorse my work or me, and their image is protected under an attribution license.

AIR POLLUTION: American Lung Association launches billboard campaign against Fred Upton

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Images via American Lung Association

Fred Upton, who is a Republican Representative from Michigan and the chairman of the U.S. House Committee on Energy and Commerce, wants to “to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the ability to regulate climate-warming gases like carbon dioxide, which the agency declared a threat to public health and safety in 2009.” The American Lung Association (ALA), in response, placed “four ads in Upton’s district, some in direct view of Upton’s district offices.” More via the ALA:

The American Lung Association is working to protect the public health from air pollution. We are defending the Clean Air Act to ensure that all Americans can have air that is safe and healthy to breathe. The Clean Air Act has provided the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) with the authority and the responsibility to protect and clean up the nation’s air since 1970. Thanks to that law and later amendments that strengthened it, people throughout the nation breathe cleaner, healthier air.

But, the work is not done; millions of Americans continue to breathe unhealthy air. Polluters and some members of Congress want to interfere with EPA’s ability to protect public health. Most Americans believe that the Clean Air Act needs protecting. We are fighting hard to prevent anyone from weakening or undermining the law or the protective standards the law provides. We are fighting to ensure EPA has the legal authority and necessary funding to continue to protect public health.

Please join us in this fight for air. Click here for an interactive overview of the fight.

The U.S. Supreme Court, in Massachusetts v. Environmental Protection Agency, determined that carbon emissions can be regulated under the Clean Air Act. The Court also determined that if the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) wishes to regulate carbon emissions or if the agency wanted to decide against regulating carbon emissions, then the EPA must determine whether greenhouse gas emissions cause or contribute to climate change and therefore endangers the public’s health and welfare. Consequently, the EPA reasonably concluded in an endangerment finding that “six long-lived and directly-emitted greenhouse gases: carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O), hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), perfluorocarbons (PFCs), and sulfur hexafluoride (SF6)” threaten the public’s health and welfare. Via the EPA (emphasis added):

The Administrator has considered how elevated concentrations of the well-mixed greenhouse gases and associated climate change affect public health by evaluating the risks associated with changes in air quality, increases in temperatures, changes in extreme weather events, increases in food- and water-borne pathogens, and changes in aeroallergens. The evidence concerning adverse air quality impacts provides strong and clear support for an endangerment finding. Increases in ambient ozone are expected to occur over broad areas of the country, and they are expected to increase serious adverse health effects in large population areas that are and may continue to be in nonattainment. The evaluation of the potential risks associated with increases in ozone in attainment areas also supports such a finding.

.       .       .

There is some evidence that elevated carbon dioxide concentrations and climate changes can lead to changes in aeroallergens that could increase the potential for allergenic illnesses. The evidence on pathogen borne disease vectors provides directional support for an endangerment finding. The Administrator acknowledges the many uncertainties in these areas. Although these adverse effects provide some support for an endangerment finding, the Administrator is not placing primary weight on these factors.

Finally, the Administrator places weight on the fact that certain groups, including children, the elderly, and the poor, are most vulnerable to these climate-related health effects.

The Administrator has considered how elevated concentrations of the well-mixed greenhouse gases and associated climate change affect public welfare by evaluating numerous and far-ranging risks to food production and agriculture, forestry, water resources, sea level rise and coastal areas, energy, infrastructure, and settlements, and ecosystems and wildlife. For each of these sectors, the evidence provides support for a finding of endangerment to public welfare. The evidence concerning adverse impacts in the areas of water resources and sea level rise and coastal areas provides the clearest and strongest support for an endangerment finding, both for current and future generations. Strong support is also found in the evidence concerning infrastructure and settlements, as well ecosystems and wildlife. Across the sectors, the potential serious adverse impacts of extreme events, such as wildfires, flooding, drought, and extreme weather conditions, provide strong support for such a finding. Water resources across large area

On the Net:

  1. House Panel Approves Bill Stripping EPA’s Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases
  2. Melting Ice Sheets Now Largest Contributor To Rising Sea Levels: Study

ENERGY: Is the nuclearization of energy sources a prudent investment?

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Image via Clay Bennett

Personally, I’m not against using nuclear energy sources to meet energy demand and to reduce carbon emissions. However, since there are significant drawbacks to nuclear power, I do not believe that the nuclearization of energy sources, or substantially increasing the number of nuclear power stations to meet energy demand and to reduce carbon emissions, represents prudent energy policy. I’ve outlined the significant drawbacks to nuclear power before:

[T]he Republican Party believes that “the best way for utility companies to reduce carbon emissions is to increase their supply of nuclear energy.” However, nuclear power isn’t cheap, and the costs associated with constructing new nuclear power plants have skyrocketed. There are also substantial costs associated with decommissioning nuclear power plants (“it may cost $300 million or more to shut down and decommission a plant“). Other negatives associated with nuclear power production include the fact that the nuclear power industry depends solely on a nonrenewable energy source, and there’s the well-known problem of storing nuclear waste. Also, “the process of thermoelectric generation from fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas, as well as nuclear power, is water intensive. In fact, each kWh generated requires on average approximately 25 gallons of water to produce.” Therefore, drought could force nuclear power plants to shut down. What’s more, there are past and present safety concerns with nuclear power production. Recently, the nuclear power industry has been plagued by safety problems at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power Plant. Certainly, if the costs associated with decommissioning nuclear power plants, with the management of nuclear power plants, and with the disposal of nuclear waste are considered, then both solar and wind power are substantially cheaper than nuclear power.

Shouldn’t the massive costs associated with nuclear power construction, production, and decommissioning be invested into renewable energy research and production and into research and technologies related to energy storage, grid modernization, and energy conservation. According to Nathan Lewis, “To get the 10 terawatts we need to stay on the ‘business-as-usual’ curve, we’d need 10,000 of our current one-gigawatt reactors, and that means we’d have to build one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 straight years.” Lewis also points out that “one hundred twenty thousand terawatts of solar power hits the earth . . . It is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption.” More via an earlier post on the Conservation Report:

Nathan Lewis provides a gloomy but sobering assessment of the challenges humanity will face in meeting its future energy needs (emphasis added):

Energy is the single most important technological challenge facing humanity today. Nothing else in science or technology comes close in comparison. If we don’t invent the next nano-widget, if we don’t cure cancer in 20 years, like it or not the world will stay the same. But with energy, we are in the middle of doing the biggest experiment that humans will have ever done, and we get to do that experiment exactly once. And there is no tomorrow, because in 20 years that experiment will be cast in stone. If we don’t get this right, we can say as students of physics and chemistry that we know that the world will, on a timescale comparable to modern human history, never be the same.

The currency of the world is not the dollar, it’s the joule.

.       .       .

Humanity’s current energy consumption rate is 13 trillion thermal watts, or 13 terawatts.

.       .       .

The United States consumes a quarter of the world’s energy, at a rate of about 3.3 terawatts[.]

.       .       .

With population and GDP growth conspiring together, we would then obtain a tripling of energy demand by 2050. This is partly mitigated, however, by the fact that we’re using energy more efficiently per unit of GDP. The ratio of energy consumption to GDP has been declining at about 1 percent, globally averaged, per year. The United States actually saves energy at a faster rate, about 2 percent per year. Because we have such a high per-capita energy baseline consumption, it is easier for us to save off that base, whereas the developing countries save less. The “business as usual” scenario assumes that this will continue, and if we project that down, we will achieve an average energy consumption of two kilowatts per person within our lifetimes. (The United States now uses 10 kilowatts per person.) But factor in population growth and conservative economic growth, and we’ll still need twice as much energy as we need now.

In terms of average thermal load, a person on a 2,000-calorie-per-day diet is basically a hundred-watt lightbulb. And in our highly mechanized western agricultural system, the energy embedded in food—to run the farm and grow the food and transport it to the supermarket and put it in the refrigerator—is 10 to 20 times the energy content of the food itself. And the farther you live from the food source, the more embedded energy you consume. If we are 100-watt lightbulbs, this means that just keeping us fed requires one to two kilowatts.

.       .       .

Ice cores taken near Vostok Station, Antarctica, show that the CO2 level has been in a narrow band between 200 and 300 parts per million by volume (ppmv) for the last 425,000 years; data from other cores have extended this back to 670,000 years. Current CO2 levels are about 380 ppmv. “Business as usual” will require 10 trillion watts, 10 terawatts, of carbon-free power, and it never stabilizes CO2 levels—they just keep going up. So even on that track, we are betting against data that goes back for almost a million straight years, and hoping that this time, we get lucky.

.       .       .

[U]nfortunately, there is no natural destruction mechanism for carbon dioxide in our atmosphere. Unlike ozone depletion, it will not heal by itself through chemical processes. In our highly oxidizing atmosphere, CO2 is an end product. The lifetimes of CO2 in the atmosphere are well known, and the time for 500 to 600 ppmv of CO2 to decay back to 300 ppmv is between 500 and 5,000 years. Which means that the CO2 we produce over the next 40 years, and its associated effects, will last for a timescale comparable to modern human history. This is why, within the next 20 years, we either solve this problem or the world will never be the same. How different that world will be, we won’t know until we get there.

If we want to hold CO2 even to 550 ppmv, even with aggressive energy efficiency we will need as much clean, carbon-free energy within the next 40 years, online, as the entire oil, natural gas, coal, and nuclear industries today combined—10 to 15 terawatts. This is not changing a few lightbulbs in Fresno, this is building an industry comparable to 50 Exxon Mobils. Furthermore, if we wait 30 years, the amount of carbon-free energy we’ll need will be even greater, and needed even faster, because in the meantime we will have put out 30 years of accumulated CO2 emissions that will not go away for centuries to millennia. So stabilizing at 550 ppmv will then require about 15 to 20 terawatts of carbon-free power in 2050.

.       .       .

So let’s look at carbon-neutral energy sources. We could go nuclear, which is the only proven technology that we have that could scale to these numbers. We have about 400 nuclear power plants in the world today. To get the 10 terawatts we need to stay on the “business-as-usual” curve, we’d need 10,000 of our current one-gigawatt reactors, and that means we’d have to build one every other day somewhere in the world for the next 50 straight years. I’ve been giving this talk in one version or another for five years—we should have already built on the order of 1,000 new reactors, or double what’s ever been built, just to stay on track. So we’re really behind.

There isn’t enough terrestrial uranium on the planet to build them as once-through reactors. We could get enough uranium from seawater, if we processed the equivalent of 3,000 Niagara Falls 24/7 to do the extraction. Which means that the only credible nuclear-energy source today involves plutonium. That’s never talked about by the politicians, but it’s a fact. Forgive my facetiousness, but on some level we should be thanking North Korea and Iran for doing their part to mitigate global warming. We’d need about 10,000 fast-breeder reactors and, by the way, their commissioned lifetime is only 50 years. That means that after we choose this route, we’re building one of them every other day, or more rapidly, forever.

We don’t have time for the physicists to figure out how to make nuclear fusion reactors—they’ve been saying it will be demonstrated (although not economical) in 35 years, and they’ve been saying that for the last 50. If we assume they’re right this time, then ITER, a multinational demonstration fusion reactor being built in the south of France, will demonstrate break even—that is, it will put out as much energy as it takes to run it—in 35 years, and it will run for all of one week before the entire machine will, by design, disintegrate in the presence of that high-neutron radiation and temperature flux. And in the meantime we would have to build a commercial fission reactor every day for the next 30 years. It’s not going to happen.

.       .       .

One hundred twenty thousand terawatts of solar power hits the earth . . . It is the only natural energy resource that can keep up with human consumption. Everything else will run up against the stops, soon. In fact, more solar energy hits the earth in one hour than all the energy the world consumes in a year.

POLITICS: Republicans attack policies and regulations that promote energy conservation, address environmental degradation, and protect the public’s health

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Republicans are using the state of the economy and the debate over the national debt to attack the EPA, to rollback environmental regulations, and to rollback policies that address overconsumption, pollution, and our addiction to oil. Republicans aren’t considering the best interests of the American people or the welfare of the public when they imprudently decide to attack policies that attempt to address issues threatening U.S. national security. Climate change, pollution, and our reliance on dwindling, dirty fossil fuels are all issues that the federal government must address to secure our future. Instead, the majority of Republicans don’t consider climate change, energy security, or environmental degradation as issues that must be addressed in order to preserve national security and to protect the public welfare. For example, House Representative Mike Simpson, a Republican from Idaho, “added language to the Continuing Resolution that would block any attempt by the Obama Administration to enforce rules under the Clean Water Act, undermining the EPA’s ability to administer these programs.” Another House Republican, Michele Bachmann, recently “introduced legislation that would eliminate federal light bulb standards passed in 2007 that are expected to have the effect of phasing out some incandescent bulbs in the next few years.” Republicans also want to defund the EPA, and Tea Party Republican Rand Paul recently blamed the Department of Energy for his toilet problems. Another Republican Tea Partier, Marco Rubio, a junior Senator from Florida, “hopes to use the budget debate happening now in the Senate to block new pollution controls for Florida waterways.” Since Republicans [are] reversing a series of in-house green initiatives undertaken by Democrats” at the U.S. Capitol, their regressive efforts aren’t limited to rolling back major U.S. environmental regulations. Given the GOP’s shenanigans, I’m baffled that they can even get elected into a majority.

On the Net & Resources:

  1. House Panel Approves Bill Stripping EPA’s Power to Regulate Greenhouse Gases
  2. House Subcommittee Moves To Block EPA Funding On Emissions
  3. Light bulbs in spotlight as senators lambaste US efficiency standards
  4. Rand Paul Blames Energy Department for Faulty Toilets, Among Other Things
  5. House Republicans Open a Major Budget Battle, Proposing Deep Cuts Into Energy, Environment and Climate Spending