Coal 1, Tuna 0

BP may at last be on the verge of permanently capping the Deep Horizon gusher, while much of the rest of the world, from Moscow to New York, swelters in a global heat wave. Even as we may have averted the worst-case short term consequences of the oil spill, our long term trend is still headied in the wrong direction.

Last month I read an article on the continuing coal age in the New York Times that seemed another omen of a bleak future. You might think that coal is in decline given it's sorry reputation in the U.S., but worldwide the opposite is true. According to Stanford University researcher Richard Morse:

Coal is the world’s fastest growing fossil fuel (for the 8th year now) and likely will be for the next 10-20 at least. According to BP’s 2010 Statistical Review of World Energy released this month, coal now occupies a greater share of the world’s energy mix than at any point since 1970.

This doesn’t receive much attention in the U.S. because our coal market is essentially disconnected from global markets and the domestic trend is quite the opposite. But there is a reason my colleague calls the global energy era we are embarking upon the “renaissance of coal.” China, India, Indonesia, Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, and most of the rest of Asia are predicating their growth on coal....

In my view climate regimes that don’t address the coal issue — via addressing mitigation in developing world power sectors at a much larger scale than Kyoto ever accomplished — don’t have much hope from a mitigation perspective. And that is going to be really, really hard. Thus the game is looking more and more like adaptation. As we can see in China and India, they view development of a coal-based electricity infrastructure as essential to economic development.

I've been meaning to post about this article for over a month now, particularly because just three days later a piece was published in the New York Times Magazine about the imminent demise of the bluefin tuna:

What was in the water that day was a congregation of Atlantic bluefin tuna, a fish that when prepared as sushi is one of the most valuable forms of seafood in the world. It’s also a fish that regularly journeys between America and Europe and whose two populations, or “stocks,” have both been catastrophically overexploited. The BP oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, one of only two known Atlantic bluefin spawning grounds, has only intensified the crisis. By some estimates, there may be only 9,000 of the most ecologically vital megabreeders left in the fish’s North American stock, enough for the entire population of New York to have a final bite (or two) of high-grade otoro sushi. The Mediterranean stock of bluefin, historically a larger population than the North American one, has declined drastically as well. Indeed, most Mediterranean bluefin fishing consists of netting or “seining” young wild fish for “outgrowing” on tuna “ranches.”

An inability of the world's fishing nations to agree on limits that would ensure the sustainability of the remaining bluefin stocks may mean the loss of a truly unique animal:

There are two reasons that a mere fish should have inspired such a high-strung confrontation reminiscent of Greenpeace’s early days as a defender of whales. The first stems from fish enthusiasts who have for many years recognized the particular qualities of bluefin tuna — qualities that were they land-based creatures would establish them indisputably as “wildlife” and not just another “seafood” we eat without remorse. Not only is the bluefin’s dense, distinctly beefy musculature supremely appropriate for traversing the ocean’s breadth, but the animal also has attributes that make its evolutionary appearance seem almost deus ex machina, or rather machina ex deo — a machine from God. How else could a fish develop a sextantlike “pineal window” in the top of its head that scientists say enables it to navigate over thousands of miles? How else could a fish develop a propulsion system whereby a whip-thin crescent tail vibrates at fantastic speeds, shooting the bluefin forward at speeds that can reach 40 miles an hour? And how else would a fish appear within a mostly coldblooded phylum that can use its metabolic heat to raise its body temperature far above that of the surrounding water, allowing it to traverse the frigid seas of the subarctic?

Yes, bluefin tuna are warmblooded.

This may be our future. One where coal wins and the bluefin loses.

BILL GROSS, MEANWHILE, reports on the absurdity of automatic toilets in his latest commentary. He goes on to make the argument that our economic troubles in the coming decade or two may stem from this fact: capitalism depends on growth, and ultimately economic growth depends on population growth. In an era of a stabilizing world population, we may be in for long period of economic malaise.

How ironic: our insatiable appetite is cooking the planet and devouring its bounty, yet we may suffer financially because we've finally gotten the growth of our own species under control.

Meditations on distinguishing "the real" from "the fake"

In 2004 I saw one of my favorite plays, Naomi Iizuka's 36 Views, at Portland Center Stage. It dealt with the difficulty of determining what is real and what is fake in the domains of art and human relationships. Like the play, this New York Times article also asks, "Does it matter if it's a fake?"

And that’s what we’re looking for when we look at art, no? Something of value, deeper and more meaningful than a name or a number, which can’t be gotten out of a test tube or lab report, which, emotionally speaking, requires an effort on our part. It demands that we look for ourselves.

And then you never know what you might find. A “Virgin and Child With an Angel,” an early work by Francesco Francia, the Bolognese master and contemporary of Raphael, for years was said by the gallery to exemplify the painter’s training as a goldsmith. Its refinement was admired. Then an identical picture turned up. Gallery conservators examined their version and found that the tiny aging cracks on the surface had actually been painted, faked. Further studies revealed the use of latter-day pigments like chrome yellow, and an underdrawing that seemed more 19th century than Renaissance.

The work was a forgery. Science proved it. And so there it hangs in the show, on a wall of shame, surrounded like a mug shot by the evidence of its true crime.

But look, never mind what the label says, and you may notice something else about the picture, too, some other truth.

It’s beautiful.

Quote for the day

P.M. Carpenter on the nature of political change in America:

If genuine conservative genius there ever was, it came in the Founders' Burkean inspiration that true and lasting progress must pass the tests of peaceful struggle and tireless debate. Achieving a national consensus is hard, but it's necessary to progress' durability; vast and overanxious progress in a consensual void only insures its unraveling.

Big Brother meets Mad Men

The Wall Street Journal looked into online tracking tools that major U.S. websites download onto your computer (my emphasis):

The state of the art is growing increasingly intrusive, the Journal found. Some tracking files can record a person's keystrokes online and then transmit the text to a data-gathering company that analyzes it for content, tone and clues to a person's social connections. Other tracking files can re-spawn trackers that a person may have deleted.

To measure the sensitivity of the data gathered by tracking companies, the Journal created an "exposure index" for the top 50 sites. Dictionary.com ranked highest in exposing users to potentially aggressive surveillance: It installed 168 tracking tools that didn't let users decline to be tracked, and 121 tools that, according to their privacy statements, don't rule out collecting financial or health data. Dictionary.com attributed the number of tools to its use of many different ad networks, each of which puts tools on its site.

Some of the tracking files identified by the Journal were so detailed that they verged on being anonymous in name only. They enabled data-gathering companies to build personal profiles that could include age, gender, race, zip code, income, marital status and health concerns, along with recent purchases and favorite TV shows and movies.

The ad industry says tracking doesn't violate anyone's privacy because the data sold doesn't identify people by name, and the tracking activity is disclosed in privacy policies. And while many companies are involved in collecting, analyzing and selling the data, they provide a useful service by raising the chance Internet users see ads and information relevant to them personally.

I just love how these people, including Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg (interviewed here on NPR), think that we users are just thrilled to be getting all of these "relevant" ads.

Some sites, like Google and Microsoft, provide ways of opting out of their tracking tools.

You can also clear all the cookies on your computer, or do what I just did: go through them and selectively remove all the ones that you don't recognize.

Quote for the day

Sickness comes on horseback but departs on foot.

-- Dutch proverb, sometimes attributed to William C. Hazlitt

Making end of life decisions

My grandmother died in a hospice, and a year later, my aunt died at home but with housecalls from the local hospice. I've been volunteering for the past two years with hospices in Las Vegas and Portland. It's my way of giving back for what others did to help my family members die with dignity.

I heard a great segment on Fresh Air tonight. Terry Gross interviewed my favorite medical writer, Dr. Atul Gawande. The topic was a different model for end of life medical care: specifically, a focus on helping people experience what they want with the time they have left rather than simply keeping them alive, and how hospice care fits into such an approach.

Here are links to the program, Gawande's New Yorker article, "Letting Go," and a 2009 post on this topic which references another Fresh Air segment.

Website of the day

Here's a long list of the cognitive biases to which we're all susceptible. Yeesh.

An unexpected benefit of the healthcare reform law

I didn't know this was in the bill, but if you now pay for medical treatment out of your own pocket, it's against the law for information about that treatment to be reported to any insurance agency, including your own. Very cool.

More info here as well as a sample form to give to your healthcare provider under such circumstances. Both are provided by the Patient Privacy Rights Foundation.

Vespertine

Determined to not be late for an outdoor, dusk screening of E.T. at the Edgefield Lodge, I checked online to see what time sunset was. And as it so often happens on the web, one things leads to another, and before I knew it, I was having one of those I did not know that moments.

I had always thought dusk was more or less synonymous with sunset, just as dawn meant sunrise, but apparently not.

Dawn is when light first appears in the morning sky. Sunrise is when the sun breaks the horizon, and sunset, well... duh. Dusk is when the last light leaves the sky. This diagram explains it all:

The best part of my "discovery" was the word vespertine, a biology term that describes something of or related to the evening.