Pangloss

I've started a thread over on the Environment sub-board to discuss the Everglades land buy-back. It has a political angle so I just wanted to mention it here as well. http://www.scienceforums.net/forum/showthread.php?t=33769

Couple articles: http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/nation/la-na-everglades25-2008jun25,0,3721951.story http://in.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idINN2436313220080624?pageNumber=2&virtualBrandChannel=0 The state of Florida has arranged to buy back 187,000 acres of farmland currently owned by US Sugar corp. It's the biggest restoration purchase in Everglades history and a deal likened by Gov. Charlie Crist as being comparable with the founding of Yellowstone. This story came completely out of the blue. A huge surprise even locally. The land in question is just a few miles from where I live, and my wife and I have spent considerable time wandering about the Everglades in kayaks and air boats, so the deal hits somewhat close to home (literally) for me. The region has been deteriorating gradually for decades, and one of the main reasons for that is the constricted flow of water, which has gradually increased due to South Florida development. Encroachment on the Everglades stopped years ago due to sensible restrictions on the places where development could occur, but the increased demand for water combined with the current drought were turning the river of grass into a river of slightly-damp mud. But that gradual change also affected the sugar business, and this deal seems to be one of those rare moments of clarity and unity between business and government. US Sugar realized its business was becoming unsustainable, and government realized it had an opportunity for real change. Astonishing, eh? The deal will take place over six years, allowing for the retraining and relocation of employees, and involving the raising of bonds paid for in part by the sale of sugar during that time (I don't quite understand that; bonds are sold to the public, so that didn't really make sense, but that's reporting for you, or maybe I just misread something). $1.7 billion is a lot of money, but almost none of it (only $50 million) comes out of taxpayer wallets, and the bonds are a good investment -- Florida as a state is a rock-solid investment because of the tourist industry, which this deal actually helps to protect. Obviously the owners get a pretty penny out of the deal, but it's their land and their business so that only seems fair. I think this is a red-letter day for environmentalism as well as for Republican governor Charlie Crist. I'm sure it's no accident this comes right when Crist's name is high on the list of potential Vice Presidential nominees, but I think this would have happened either way -- Crist's star is definitely on the rise.

I agree that "subsidies, protectionism, and populism" are the ugly side of the current crop of Democratic politicians, though those are certainly labels that can be aimed at Republican politicians as well. The protectionism racket surrounding NAFTA at the moment is particularly painful to watch. Labor leadership is smart enough to know better, and it's teamed up with Democratic politicians to promise something to its voting membership that it does not want and can not deliver. That having been said, I'm in favor of renegotiating trade agreements if there are tangible benefits to be gained (such as equalizing child labor laws and safety standards across the border), and realistically we may have to recognize that now that in the era of globalized free trade this may be the mechanism by which agreements are updated over time. (I.E. you spot an inequality and you get it fixed by exaggerating the purpose and effect of the repairs to the voters.)

Here's a Thomas the Tank episode narrated by Carlin: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTVAD_-jjLk&feature=related I have a little nephew who has some Carlin-narrated Thomas episodes on DVD, and insists on showing them to me every time I'm over. It actually took me a while to realize I was hearing George Carlin there, but I realized at some point I was subconsciously picturing the narrator say "What is this sh*t?" between takes.

You're not the only fan, Sisyphus. She is very talented, I agree.

I think they're already drilling well beyond the continental shelf (which is only, what, 600 feet? I think they're out to ten thousand feet or more). POM can probably answer this for us. He and I had a disagreement earlier about whether deep oil might be useful down the road.

Yes, as I said above (and confirmed in one of the articles I linked), a 1977 treaty splits the Florida Straits in half. Cubans can drill on the south side of that line. It's about 90 miles from Key West to Havana, so I just cut that number in half. Where the wells would actually be placed, I couldn't say, but of course most of the Florida coastline is beachfront. Not all of it, of course (especially in the keys, where much of that coastline is actually a lot more ecologically sensitive than a mere beach). Edit: I should turn the page before I reply, eh? Nice map, that suggests that much of the drilling area might not be quite as direct threat as I'd feared, although it's still a direct, nearby threat. We could talk to Cuba about that, if we weren't so dunderheaded about the blockade and pandering to the exile community. And of course anything in that NW area threatens the entire Gulf Coast and a great deal of Mexican coastline. ------------ One of the the funny things about this is that if Florida accepted one of the current offshore drilling proposals, any new rigs would be built fully 150 miles from the Florida shore (there are no proposals right now to drill in the Florida Straits). Which means that Cuba and the Chinese would be drilling closer to American beaches than Americans are.

Well, I guess if we're okay with the Cubans drill 5 billion barrels of oil 45 miles from the Florida beaches, then I suppose "catastrophic environmental impact" is no longer a concern.

Carlin's classic comparison of Baseball and Football, from ESPN this morning: http://msn.foxsports.com/mlb/story/8272482/Carlin%3A-The-difference-between-baseball-and-football

This sounds like a good idea. I need to know more about it, I guess, like why they wouldn't just open another market elsewhere. Though there seems to be a lot of international agreement about speculation on oil being a bad thing. I don't know if this would actually lower the price at the pump, though. I read about a month ago that the commodity price had risen 70% over X amount of time while the price at the pump had only risen 30% (or something like that), so cutting the speculation off might only bring the barrel price in line with the pump price. But I don't know if that resolved itself already, or if it was ever completely accurate to begin with.

That's true, and I think Obama can deflect some of this criticism by continuing (and advertising) his support for switch grass. That could be, in fact I would almost get on board with that if it wasn't for the Tom Daschle angle. I was just out in the car listening to Rush Limbaugh, who said (in between musical snippets of "Barack the Magic Negro", ugh!) that Daschle sits on the boards of five different ethanol companies. Still, that's Daschle, not Obama. You may well be spot on there. And while I don't like pandering to ignorance, at least it's a transparent and undisguised motive.

I deconstructed that scene once for my blog. http://hardrockstars.org/blogs/pat/archive/2007/08/06/scene-deconstruction-1-casablanca.aspx

The ironic choice of lyrics of one of her songs, Phi.

The New York Times is running a piece today about what they characterize as close ties between the Obama campaign and the Ethanol interests in the country. Couple links below (second one included in case you get stuck at login with the first one): http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/23/us/politics/23ethanol.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/25324195 I'm sure it's no accident that this comes just days after the controversy surrounding Obama's decline of public funding, because it appears to (at least superficially) counter the campaign's claim that it is publically funded, i.e. mainly supported by small donors. This doesn't contradict that claim, but it raises the question of whether an 80% public funding claim actually frees you from obligations to the other 20%. The article also paints a sharp contrast with Obama's Republican opponent: One of the things I liked about the article is that it doesn't fall for the usual media line of "ethanol = good". With corn at $8/bushel farmers have no reason to change crops. This needs to be resolved. I think Obama should abandon ethanol.

You're missing the point, which I admit may be localized. I'm not leaping off a bridge because someone else is leaping off it, I'm being dragged off the bridge whether I want to go or not. The oil is going to be drilled, threatening the exact same coastlines that would be threatened if we were drilling it ourselves (just talking about Florida here for the moment). I've no idea how that might apply to other coastlines. Can China drill for oil in international waters 201 miles off the coast of California? I don't see why not, but I don't know if that's currently being threatened.

And what do you think about that?

Can you really apply that spin to Florida, though, given what I've just told you about Cuba?

Right, but a lot of those "secret muslim" followers are actually undecideds who are just being led around by the nose. If you fight that perception then you can scrape off the independent-minded people who thought there might be something to those claims, bringing them into reality and showing that stuff to be nonsense. You're right, you won't capture the hardcore Rush Limbaugh-listeners. But you'll get plenty of undecideds. TV spots are all about undecided voters.

Well this gets back to the confusion factor I mentioned in the other thread. Most of those "18 billion barrels" projections we've been talking about, including the ones iNow linked in the other thread (which also came from the government), say that that's the amount in ANWR, not overall. But other citations like the one you linked, say that it's 18 (or 16, or less) for the whole kit and kaboodle. I'm not saying you're wrong, but you're not clearly right either. But that projected rise is old, written before we had six straight months of declines. The new belief, as of last week, is that 2008 will see the first decline in recent years. I linked a story on that in the other thread. And of course if Obama follows-through on his promise for a new 40 mpg standard, and the current trends towards mass transit and away from gas-guzzlers, we could see it drop even faster. There was even a report last week that some realtors are saying that a lot of customers are asking for housing near mass transit hubs and closer to urban centers. ---------- Anyway, getting back to the subject at hand, the more I think about this, the more likely it seems that offshore drilling is going to become a reality. The environmentalists might as well just stay home. The sleeping giant's awake, folks, and they're not brooking any nonsense about tiny percentage chances of a few gallons of oil on a beach here or there. The motivation is wrong, of course -- nothing we DO is going to drop the price of gas (the only thing I can see dropping it is a change in speculation), but there could be significant benefit over the long haul, as we've discussed. We can drill it safer, we have a right to it, and there is tangible, predictable benefit. End of story. I guess you could say the "debate is over" on offshore drilling in the US.

Namely Cuba and the Chinese. I'd forgotten all about this story, which came out in early May, but my wife reminded me about it last night. Cuba made a deal with Chinese and Indian companies to drill the same oil that Florida is now considering drilling. In the past Cuba withheld drilling, in part because Florida also promised not to allow it. But they made the first move here, not Florida. The agreement is basically right down the middle of the Florida straight, but that straight is only 80 or so miles across, and the fields surely cross over that boundary down deep. So if they start drilling that oil, they're going to get oil we could have pulled up on our side. They even mention in the second article that there will be "slant drilling" involved. And perhaps more to the point, any spills are just as likely to hit Florida beaches as Cuban ones. Gee, I wonder if Cuba has any environmental laws, or if Cuba would allow those laws to interfere with drilling. Hmm, lemme ponder that one for about 1.8 nanoseconds. http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/05/09/news/cuba.php http://www.americanfreepress.net/html/china_starts_oil_drilling.html I thought this quote from the first article was also interesting: Gee, that's a pretty fair amount of oil. Over 14 years' worth of US consumption, at our current (declining) rate.

Pardon me, I didn't mean collecting them in a discussion thread. I was thinking more along the lines of a web site.

Yes, there was definitely a publicity angle, though I imagine it was really about specific-mission training as well. They do training all the time, just not on that scale -- this exercise was very large. In fact I haven't seen this written up anywhere, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's the largest exercise they've ever run outside of American "red flag" efforts.

It might be interesting for historical purposes to gather all the smear about Obama floating around the Net over the next few months. All the Photoshops of him wearing explosive vests and turbans, etc.

The House took out the trash late Friday (too late in the day for major news reporting), overwhelmingly passing the new wiretapping law, giving the White House a major victory in the War on Terror. The bill re-approves FISA and also gives the telecoms (more or less) a pass on their liability for earlier wiretapping. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/06/21/washington/21fisacnd.html?hp The bill is expected to pass the senate, also by a wide margin, and will, of course, be signed by the not-so-lame-duck President. Yessiree, those Democrats (who also reauthorized Iraqi war spending last week) sure are changing things in Washington!