Believe it or not: moving towards energy independence

The Romney/Gingrich crowd would never admit it, but America is actually moving towards energy independence:

Taken together, the increasing production and declining consumption have unexpectedly brought the United States markedly closer to a goal that has tantalized presidents since Richard Nixon: independence from foreign energy sources, a milestone that could reconfigure American foreign policy, the economy and more. In 2011, the country imported just 45 percent of the liquid fuels it used, down from a record high of 60 percent in 2005.

“There is no question that many national security policy makers will believe they have much more flexibility and will think about the world differently if the United States is importing a lot less oil,” said Michael A. Levi, an energy and environmental senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. “For decades, consumption rose, production fell and imports increased, and now every one of those trends is going the other way.”

As President Obama stated in January, oil production in America is at an eight year high.

The refrigerator on top of your television

All I can say is, "Wow."

There are 160 million so-called set-top boxes in the United States, one for every two people, and that number is rising. Many homes now have one or more basic cable boxes as well as add-on DVRs, or digital video recorders, which use 40 percent more power than the set-top box.

One high-definition DVR and one high-definition cable box use an average of 446 kilowatt hours a year, about 10 percent more than a 21-cubic-foot energy-efficient refrigerator, a recent study found.

These set-top boxes are energy hogs mostly because their drives, tuners and other components are generally running full tilt, or nearly so, 24 hours a day, even when not in active use. The recent study, by the Natural Resources Defense Council, concluded that the boxes consumed $3 billion in electricity per year in the United States — and that 66 percent of that power is wasted when no one is watching and shows are not being recorded. That is more power than the state of Maryland uses over 12 months.

Full story from the New York Times.

And then there's this from a few months ago, also from the Times:

In California, where about 400,000 people are licensed to grow marijuana for personal medical use or to sell to dispensaries, indoor cultivation is responsible for a whopping 8 percent of household electricity usage, costing about $3 billion yearly and producing the annual carbon emission of a million average cars.

Gas prices, catering to the rich, and Obama's place in the political spectrum

Ezra Klein looks at concerns about price gouging in the gasoline market and comes up empty. The real explanation is increasing world demand and Saudia Arabia's unwillingness (or inability) to increase production to compensate.

In another post he also writes about polling data that indicates the rich are less concerned about the state of the economy than other people. One effect of this, due to the fact that decision makers are not only wealthier than average themselves but also more attuned to the needs of the wealthy, is a considerable bias in Washington against taking action to improve the economy.

Nate Silver has a great post that not only looks at where Obama falls in the conservative-liberal spectrum relative to previous Democratic presidents but also at how the two parties and the Congress as a whole has simultaneously shifted to the right and become more polarized since the 1970s.

Can't people do anything right???

So we've been hearing a lot how natural gas is a clean alternative to coal, and that America has so much of it that we could greatly reduce our imports of foreign oil if we switched to using natural gas to fuel our cars and trucks.

And that in the last couple of decades companies have developed new technology that lets them extract natural gas from shale deposits, expanding our reserves even more. We're told that the oil companies inject water under high pressure to break up rocks deep underground, releasing the gas in the process.

But we've also heard some concerns that this "fracking" may be polluting groundwater.

Now comes this report: companies have apparently been knowingly injecting not just water but also toxic solutions containing carcinogens like benzene, and those chemicals are turning up in drinking water.

This kind of thing makes me feel like it's about impossible to have any faith in people. I'm sick of listening to conservatives argue endlessly about how we have too much regulation, and we should just let business police itself.

Sorry, but I just have zero confidence in the ability of American companies to do the right thing on their own.

The unbearable weight of being

It's been a heavy week, both on the home front and in the world. And since I don't really want to get into my personal woes, I'll focus on the news.

After reading about the U.N. workers who were killed in response to a Florida Koran burning, I felt such an urge to succumb to isolationism: bring all the troops home, forget globalization, and erect a 30' wall at the U.S. border.

But, alas, things aren't so great in North America either. Earlier in the week I wrote this email to a couple of friends:

In my sociology class in Las Vegas, we discussed how ridiculously low the official poverty line is in America. A single person is considered to be living below the poverty line if they are making less than roughly $10,000/year.

This [New York Times] article looks at how much people really need to make in order to have a minimum level of economic survey (their figure is closer to $30,000/year for a single person).

Now consider the fact that the most recent statistics show that about 14% of Americans live below the "official" poverty line. Meanwhile, the top one percent hold forty percent of the country's wealth.

And I don't know how President Obama can justify it when General Electric pays no taxes, but I find it scandalous that GE's CEO Jeff Immelt heads Obama's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness.

(On the other hand, look at the Oval Office alternatives. What has our nation come to when the likes of Donald Trump, Sarah Palin, and Michelle Bachmann get air time as potential GOP presidential candidates?)

I HAD BEGUN TO THINK that we weren't really capable of dealing with climate change, but maybe we could at least lessen the problem with better nuclear technology. But watching the Fukushima mess in Japan is a reminder that we humans are mostly incapable of escaping the blinders we wear. We just have a really hard time dealing with the unknown unknowns as Andrew Revkin discusses here.

AND FINALLY: on the way to work earlier this week, I tuned in to Morning Edition midway through an interview about the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). Listening to the guest speak, I made the assumption that he fit into a particular pigeon hole, namely the "liberal commentator." I took what he was saying with a hefty grain of salt until I learned that he was actually Neil Barofsky, the Inspector General for TARP.

So while news this week that the government actually made money on its TARP loans to the banks is good, we can't forget all of the other ways that the program failed to meet its objectives (for example, the utter failure to reduce the scale of the foreclosure debacle).

You can read Mr. Barofsky's op-ed piece in the Times here or listen to his NPR interview here.

It all circles back around... in a time of financial crisis, we took the best care of the people who needed the least assistance. Instead of simply stabilizing the banking system, we sent the perpetrators home with 100 cents on the dollar and big bonuses. The Republicans want to cut-cut-cut the spending that affects most folks but keep the huge tax breaks for GE and the rich.

And the world is so small now that when an idiot in Florida burns a book, people on the other side of the globe die for it. Go figure.

Note to the anti-wind turbine crowd...

From the New York Times:

The American Bird Conservancy estimates that up to 500 million birds are killed each year by cats — about half by pets and half by feral felines...

By contrast, 440,000 birds are killed by wind turbines each year, according to the United States Fish and Wildlife Service....

The slow-moving nuclear catastrophe in Japan

The Guardian has a really useful live blog of events at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex on their news blog page. Click on the "Japan nuclear crisis" link there; it updates regularly. It's the best single source of information I've found on the topic.

Note that reactor #3 is the only one that contains plutonium, making containment there particularly important.

No easy answers to the energy question

Coal is the biggest contributor to global warming and negatively impacts the environment and human health.

Oil skews America's foreign policy and leads us into wars.

Nuclear power is so complex that human fallibility leads to disaster.

Solar and wind energy, ironically, bring out the least likely of critics: environmentalists and the NIMBY-focused middle class.

Efficiency gains can counter-intuitively lead to more energy use.

Oh, what is the human race to do?

Portugal: a case study in renewable energy

In just five years, Portugal has boosted the amount of electricity it gets from renewable sources from 17% of its total to 45%. The New York Times reports on the winners and losers in the process and why it may be more difficult for the U.S.--with its vast reserves of coal and fragmented political process--to make the same switch. Reading the article did leave me with the feeling that America is becoming antiquated in certain respects: our size slows the pace of change, and the political tension between the states and the federal government makes decisive action difficult to achieve.

Read it here.

Gail Collins on Obama's Oval Office speech

A nice column from Gail Collins at the New York Times:

I was hoping for a call to arms, a national mission as great as the environmental disaster that inspired it. After the terrorist attack, George W. Bush could have called the country to a grand, important new undertaking in which everyone sacrificed personal or regional advantage for the common good. The fact that he only told us to go shopping was the one unforgivable sin of his administration....

We are frustrated... and it’s possible that Obama may never be able to give the speech that will make us feel better. He may never really lace into the oil companies or issue the kind of call to arms on energy that the environmentalists are yearning for.

That’s because it won’t get him anywhere. Unlike Bush, he has no national consensus to build upon. He’d barely finished his muted remarks on Tuesday before the House minority leader, John Boehner, accused him of exploiting the crisis “to impose a job-killing national energy tax on struggling families and small business.” Michael Steele, the Republican Party chairman, claimed that the president was “manipulating this tragic national crisis for selfish political gain.” And the ever-popular Representative Michele Bachmann denounced the BP restitution fund as “redistribution of wealth” and “one more gateway for government control.”

As a political leader, Barack Obama seems to know what he’s doing. His unsatisfying call for a new energy policy sounded very much like the rhetoric on health care reform that used to drive Democrats nuts: open to all ideas, can’t afford inaction, if we can put a man on the moon. ... But at the end of that health care slog, he wound up with the groundbreaking law that had eluded his predecessors for decades. The process of wringing it out of Congress was so slow and oblique that even when it was over it was hard to appreciate what he’d won. But win he did.

Ironic. The man we elected because we hoped his feel-good campaign speeches might translate into achievement is actually a guy who is going to achieve, even if his presidential speeches leave us feeling blah.

What Rachel Maddow would have said if she were President

Awesome, check out Rachel Maddow's "fake president" Oval Office address on the Gulf oil spill.

Alarmingly incoherent

Mommy, mommy, she scares me! LOL

I love Sarah Palin's suggestion that "the Dutch" would be helpful in plugging the Deepwater Horizon leak because they "are known for dikes." ????

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First 500 days

First Read takes notes of what's happened in Obama's first 500 days of office:

Day 500: With hyperpartisan stories like the Romanoff job offer (dredged back into the news), the kickoff of the Blagojevich trial, and, of course, the continued oil spill, it might go unnoticed by some that today is Barack Obama's 500th day in office (though, some might argue TOMORROW is 500; We’ll let Judge Mark Knoller decide, but we digress). There's always a lot of hype surrounding a president's first 100 days, but Obama has now been in office five times longer than that marker and what a stretch it's been. On a day -- in a presidency -- when small-picture brushfire stories (like Romanoff) are dominating, here's a step back at the big picture and all that's gone on. It could almost read like Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire”… Oil spill, Health care, Tea Parties, Financial reform, bailouts for cars and banks, the stimulus, Cash for Clunkers, Toyota, Haiti, L’Aquila, Iran's elections, David Cameron, Gordon Brown, Israel flotilla, North Korea sinks South Korean ship, Afghanistan troop increase, underwear bomber, Ft. Hood, Times Square, Predator drones, Nobel Peace Prize, State of the Union/Bobby Jindal, Ted Kennedy. Scott Brown, Michael Steele, Sarah Palin resigns, Bob McDonnell, Chris Christie, special elections, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, incumbent fever (Bennett, Specter, et al), Charlie Crist's party switch, Evan Bayh, Sex Scandals: The Appalachian Trail, John Ensign, Eric Massa, Mark Souder, Jim Traficant out of jail, announces independent bid, The Salahis, Carrie Prejean, It’s John Edwards’ baby, Rangel loses his gavel, The Replacements: (Blago/Burris, Gillibrand/Caroline Kennedy, Beau Biden/Iraq/hospitalization, Al Franken sworn in as a senator MONTHS after Election Day, The Gores separate. And, by the way, for a little more context, remember this: JFK, at Day 500, had not yet faced the Cuban Missile Crisis and his attorney general, RFK, had yet to order the integration of Ole Miss. or the University of Alabama.

The world that we live in

In a column about the oil spill in the Gulf, David Brooks describes the world we now live in:

Over the past decades, we’ve come to depend on an ever-expanding array of intricate high-tech systems. These hardware and software systems are the guts of financial markets, energy exploration, space exploration, air travel, defense programs and modern production plants.

These systems, which allow us to live as well as we do, are too complex for any single person to understand. Yet every day, individuals are asked to monitor the health of these networks, weigh the risks of a system failure and take appropriate measures to reduce those risks.

If there is one thing we’ve learned, it is that humans are not great at measuring and responding to risk when placed in situations too complicated to understand....

In the weeks and hours leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster, engineers were compelled to make a series of decisions: what sort of well-casing to use; how long to circulate and when to remove the heavy drilling fluid or “mud” from the hole; how to interpret various tests. They were forced to make these decisions without any clear sense of the risks and in an environment that seems to have encouraged overconfidence.

Over the past years, we have seen smart people at Fannie Mae, Lehman Brothers, NASA and the C.I.A. make similarly catastrophic risk assessments. As Gladwell wrote in that 1996 essay, “We have constructed a world in which the potential for high-tech catastrophe is embedded in the fabric of day-to-day life.”

Unfortunately, the latest information reported in the New York Times about the behavior of employees at BP in the months, weeks, and days leading up to the Deepwater Horizon disaster show just how fallible human beings are... and why vigorous oversight is so important as the world becomes increasingly complex.

Internal documents from BP show that there were serious problems and safety concerns with the Deepwater Horizon rig far earlier than those the company described to Congress last week.

The problems involved the well casing and the blowout preventer, which are considered critical pieces in the chain of events that led to the disaster on the rig.

The documents show that in March, after several weeks of problems on the rig, BP was struggling with a loss of “well control.” And as far back as 11 months ago, it was concerned about the well casing and the blowout preventer.

On June 22, for example, BP engineers expressed concerns that the metal casing the company wanted to use might collapse under high pressure.

“This would certainly be a worst-case scenario,” Mark E. Hafle, a senior drilling engineer at BP, warned in an internal report. “However, I have seen it happen so know it can occur.”

As The Killers sing, "This is the world we live in, maybe we'll make it through."

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Obama's press conference

Here's the full press conference which focused largely on the oil spill in the Gulf, but fast forward to the 59 minute mark for President Obama's personal thoughts on the disaster.

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Not acceptable

I'm a little late to the party, but I'm increasingly dismayed by the Obama administration's response to the Deep Horizon disaster in the Gulf. I'm not sure what exactly the government should be doing right now to fix BP's blunders, but I know that continuing to grant environmental impact waivers for other deepwater projects--despite the president's moratorium--is not the way to go.

I do find it amusing that conservative commentators like Rush Limbaugh think the government isn't doing enough to clean up BP's mess. Aren't these guys the ones who are so opposed to government takeovers of just about everything?

It's not just seabirds

From free-floating microscopic crab larvae poisoned by the oil slick to whales and dolphins that drown after being intoxicated by its fumes, the disaster in the Gulf of Mexico is affecting the whole food chain.

Obama's meeting with the GOP today

Obama met with the GOP caucus today:

President Obama and the Congressional Republicans who have opposed him engaged in a lively and robust public debate this afternoon over health care, the economy and who was more to blame for the toxic atmosphere clouding the nation’s politics.

Mr. Obama visited the House Republican retreat here in an attempt to break through the partisan logjam that has helped stall his legislative agenda. What ensued was a remarkable encounter in which a president spoke to an essentially hostile crowd for an hour and half, sparring with the leadership of the opposition party in a way that is rarely seen in carefully scripted American politics.

I watched the whole thing and can highly recommend taking the time to do so, especially the question and answer portion. (Full transcript here.)

More from CBS; The Daily Dish compiled some reactions here.

Obama's opening statement:

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Here is the Q&A portion of the meeting, it's well worth watching.

Segment 1 (tax cuts and the 2008 stimulus bill)

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Segment 2 (more on tax cuts and questions about Obama's proposed discretionary spending freeze, a Constitutional line item veto, earmarks, and energy policy)

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Segment 3 (more on energy policy and earmarks, healthcare reform including Obama's failure to broadcast all of the healthcare reform bill negotiations on C-SPAN, and Republican pushback on being the "party of no")

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Segment 4 (healthcare reform including Obama's calling out the GOP for essentially accusing Dems of a "Bolshevik plot" (at the 4:40 mark))

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Segment 5 (more on healthcare reform, Obama's statements that he's read proposed GOP legislation and that legislative compromise is part of democracy, and a question from an Illinois lawmaker about Speaker Pelosi's willingness to work with Republicans on issues like free trade legislation (answered in segment 6))

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Segment 6 (Obama admits that he failed to bring the Democratic and Republican leadership together enough and answers a question about free trade; he pushes back hard on a question about the budget deficit to illustrate how false assertions prevent Democrats and Republicans from achieving anything together and sets the record straight on the spending history of the past ten years (continued in segment 7))

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Segment 7 (Obama finishes up his answer to a budget deficit question and explains why he disagrees with some Republican proposals for dealing with America's long-term deficit problems)

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Politics and immediate gratification

Commenting on last night's election and the prospect of fading Democratic fortunes, as well as the Republicans' own failure to cement an enduring majority five years ago, the New York Times suggests that an FDR New Deal-kind of realignment in the American political landscape is unlikely in the 21st century:

On a deeper level, the fading dream of realignment also reflects our attitudes about permanence in a society that judges its digital TVs by their “refresh rates” — that is, the number of times per second that the pixels on the screen rearrange themselves to create a more eye-popping picture than the one that just existed. In an accelerated culture, our loyalties toward just about everything — laundry detergents, celebrities, even churches and spouses — transfer more readily than our grandparents could have imagined. Now we dispose of phone carriers and cash-back credit cards from one month to the next, forever in search of some better deal. Forget the staying power of an institution like Johnny Carson; when Jay Leno starts to feels a little stale, he is shifted to prime time, then shifted back to late night. It was probably never very realistic for modern political thinkers of either party to dream of a 50-year reign. This century’s tectonic realignment is more likely to last 50 months or maybe 50 weeks, depending on how long it takes voters to seek out the latest offer or the newest best deal.

So given the magnitude and complexity of some of our problems--climate change, peak oil, and the growth of entitlement spending, particularly for healthcare--how does Washington develop enduring solutions when political power shifts so quickly?

ALSO IN THE TIMES TODAY, David Brooks draws an interesting analogy in a conversation with Gail Collins about what Democrats should do next given Scott Brown's victory last night:

Let’s say we had a year-long debate in the run-up to the Iraq war. Let’s say at the end of that debate, 33 percent of Americans thought it was a good idea to invade Iraq, 46 percent thought it was a bad idea and the rest weren’t sure. Then let’s say that there were a bunch of elections in places like New Jersey and Virginia in the middle of this debate and George Bush’s party lost them all badly. Let’s say at the end of this debate there was a senate race in Wyoming in which a Democratic candidate made preventing the war a central plank in his campaign. Let’s say Bush went out to Wyoming and told voters they had to support the Republican to save the Iraq invasion. And let’s say the Democrat still went on to win that Wyoming Senate seat by more than 5 percentage points.

Would you have advised George Bush under these circumstances to go ahead and invade Iraq? Would you have advised him to call a special lame duck session of Congress to push through a war resolution before the new senator could be seated? Would you have advised him to invent some legislative trick so he could still have his invasion? Or would you have said, George, I know you really want to invade Iraq. I know you think an invasion will do a lot of good for the world. But the American people are pretty clear about this issue. Maybe you should show a little doubt. Maybe you ought to listen and give this whole thing a second look.

FOR THE OPPOSITE POINT OF VIEW, namely that Democrats should move forward with getting healthcare reform legislation to President Obama's desk, Ezra Klein has a number of good posts today here, here, here, here, and here.

More angles on the Copenhagen climate talks

An aide to one of the delegations claims that the Chinese intentionally scuttled last week's climate conference. James Fallows comments.

MEANWHILE, Thomas Friedman writes about Denmark's own progress on cutting carbon emissions. And two researchers from the Netherlands, Gert Jan Kramer and Martin Haigh, argue that in order to head off disastrous climate changes, we need to not only focus on coming up with new technologies but also pay attention to how quickly they can be deployed on an industrial scale:

To combat climate change, the world's entire energy system needs a major overhaul before the middle of the century. But can we build new energy supplies that quickly? Some argue that with the right incentives we can see similar rates of change in the energy system as have been seen in information technology. So most of the debate focuses on how much the transition will cost and who will foot the bill. Here, we argue that cost is less important than the rate at which existing low-carbon energy technologies can be physically deployed. Because the scale of the energy system is so huge, it takes time to build the human and industrial capacity to achieve substantial deployment.

The authors of this Nature article worry that even in Shell's fairly optimistic alternative energy scenario, "Blueprints," the rollout of new energy sources won't be enough to achieve the greenhouse gas emissions that are needed:

Even with all these policies in place, the CO2 concentrations achieved in the Blueprints scenario fall short of environmental ambitions. An even tougher goal of stabilizing CO2 concentrations at 450 p.p.m. — as climate science recommends — would require a largely decarbonized energy sector by 2050. Our best chance of beating the deployment laws requires efforts on multiple fronts, as Blueprints shows, but going beyond those optimistic projections remains an even more significant challenge.

One implication of the deployment laws is that more action is required on the demand side to increase efficiency and curtail consumption. The good news is that demand-side solutions are subject to different laws. In principle, everyone in the developed world could use less energy tomorrow. The bad news is that it has proven exceedingly difficult to restrain our appetite for more energy. No climate actions are easy and none of them is quick.

AND FINALLY, when I lived in Las Vegas, one of the issues that concerned me was the bureacratic hurdles that slowed the progress of solar energy projects in the state. And while I care passionately about the environment, I think protecting the desert has to be balanced with the impacts climate change will have around the globe. So even as I understand Diane Feinstein's motivation, I'm worried about the effects of her proposed legislation that would limit solar projects in the Mojave.