Welcome to Yellowstone

Reality speaks up

Courtesy of McClatchy

Experimenting in the air

Airlines are trying to reduce their carbon emissions. While Solar Impulse is truly experimental and not allied with the airlines, it does represent a major attempt to make the world cleaner. Now, we learn that United Airlines will be using biofuels, fuel created from farm waste and oils derived from animal fats. It will be making a $30 million investment in one of the largest producers of aviation biofuels, Fulcrum BioEnergy.

Fulcrum turns municipal waste — household trash — into sustainable aviation fuel that can be blended directly with traditional jet fuels. The company claims its technology can cut an airline’s carbon emissions by 80 percent compared with traditional jet fuel.

United is not alone in going down this road. Other airlines are also experimenting with biofuels. 

Time leaps

Addicted to War

William Astore is a retired Lieutenant Colonel who writes for TomDispatch. His latest article is entitled "America's Got War". It addresses a fundamental problem with this country. Here are some excerpts:

War on Drugs. War on Poverty. War in Afghanistan. War in Iraq. War on terror. The biggest mistake in American policy, foreign and domestic, is looking at everything as war. When a war mentality takes over, it chooses the weapons and tactics for you. It limits the terms of debate before you even begin. It answers questions before they’re even asked.

When you define something as war, it dictates the use of the military (or militarized police forces, prisons, and other forms of coercion) as the primary instruments of policy. Violence becomes the means of decision, total victory the goal. Anyone who suggests otherwise is labeled a dreamer, an appeaser, or even a traitor.

War, in short, is the great simplifier -- and it may even work when you’re fighting existential military threats (as in World War II). But it doesn’t work when you define every problem as an existential one and then make war on complex societal problems (crime, poverty, drugs) or ideas and religious beliefs (radical Islam).
Recent American leaders have something in common with their extremist Islamic counterparts: all of them define everything, implicitly or explicitly, as a jihad, a crusade, a holy war. But the violent methods used in pursuit of various jihads, whether Islamic or secular, simply serve to perpetuate and often aggravate the struggle.

Think of America’s numerous so-called wars and consider if there’s been any measurable progress made in any of them. Lyndon Johnson declared a “war on poverty” in 1964. Fifty-one years later, there are still startling numbers of desperately poor people and, in this century, the gap between the poorest many and richest few has widened to a chasm. (Since the days of President Ronald Reagan, in fact, one might speak of a war on the poor, not poverty.) Drugs? Forty-four years after President Richard Nixon proclaimed the war on drugs, there are still millions in jail, billions being spent, and drugs galore on the streets of American cities. Terror? Thirteen years and counting after that “war” was launched, terror groups, minor in numbers and reach in 2001, have proliferated wildly and there is now something like a “caliphate” -- once an Osama bin Laden fantasy -- in the Middle East: ISIS in power in parts of Iraq and Syria, al-Qaeda on the rise in Yemen, Libya destabilized and divvied up among ever more extreme outfits, innocents still dying in U.S. drone strikes. Afghanistan? The opium trade has rebounded big time, the Taliban is resurgent, and the region is being destabilized. Iraq? A cauldron of ethnic and religious rivalries and hatreds, with more U.S. weaponry on the way to fuel the killing, in a country that functionally no longer exists. The only certainty in most of these American “wars” is their violent continuation, even when their original missions lie in tatters.
Historically, when a nation declares war, it does so to mobilize national will, as the U.S. clearly did in World War II. Accompanying our wars of recent decades, however, has been an urge not to mobilize the people, but demobilize them -- even as the "experts" are empowered to fight and taxpayer funds pour into the national security state and the military-industrial complex to keep the conflicts going.

What America needs right now is a 12-step program to break the urge to feed further our national addiction to war. The starting point for Washington -- and Americans more generally -- would obviously have to be taking that first step and confessing that we have a problem we alone can’t solve. "Hi, I’m Uncle Sam and I’m a war-oholic. Yes, I’m addicted to war. I know it’s destructive to myself and others. But I can’t stop -- not without your help."

True change often begins with confession. With humility. With an admission that not everything is within one’s control, no matter how violently one rages; indeed, that violent rage only aggravates the problem. America needs to make such a confession. Only then can we begin to wean ourselves off war.

Views from space

Courtesy of The Atlantic

Solar Impulse

Well, it's had its first major delay. It had planned to fly from China to Hawaii on its next leg, but had to stop in Japan. The Solar Impulse is powered only by the sun. Here is its voyage around the world thus far.

The pilot sits in a cockpit that is about the same size as a telephone booth. If the plane doesn't get enough sun during the day, he will have to bail. He can take naps for only twenty minutes and not too many of them.

The President Sings

SpaceX problem

Oil and Gas Companies Should Pay U.S. More as they move into the 21st Century

At least as far as what they pay the government to drill on our land. The companies pay the feds a royalty of 12.5%. That's the same rate they paid in 1920, ninety-five years ago. The fed rate is one of the lowest in the world. The states do better, some of them get double that, 25%. 

But the royalty is not the only money the fed gets from these companies. There is something called a bond. When an oil and gas company successfully bids on a lease, it must post a bond—or insurance—to guarantee that it will comply with the terms of the lease, including cleanup costs for unseen disasters during production and after the well stops producing. The bonding requirements on federal land have not been updated in more than 50 years. Currently, under regulations set in 1951, a company can secure a nationwide bond for all its oil and gas wells on public lands for only $150,000.  This works out to less than $100 per well. Yet, reclaiming a well can cost anywhere between $2,000 and $30,000.

Then, there are the bonus bids, which grant the company the right to drill on the leased land for a period of 10 years. This costs the companies $2 per acre. Finally, companies pay an annual rental fee to the federal government. Current rental rates are set at $1.50 per acre for the first five years of a lease, and $2 per acre thereafter.

Most estimates conclude that, as a result of these antiquated regulations, we are forgoing more than $730 million in revenue every year. 

Give me your tired, your poor..

...Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. That's what Emma Lazarus wrote a century or so ago. While she was writing about the U.S., it applies to all countries for the world has a refugee crisis unlike any preceding one. According to the UN, nearly 60 million people are now classified as refugees, more than at any time since such records have been kept. The number of refugees increases by 45,000 each day. And more than half are under the age of 18.

It's war and the collapse of nations that are the primary causes of the diaspora, although many of these refugees are  internally displaced. If refugees formed a country, it would be the 24th most populous in the world, between South Africa and Italy.

We have not done much to alleviate the problem. We have taken in 700 of the
4 million Syrian refugees. But other developed countries have done little, as well. The developing world hosts 9 out of 10 refugees. The top host countries, in terms of the number of refugees per capita, are Lebanon, Jordan, Nauru, Chad, Djibouti, South Sudan, Turkey, and Mauritania. Only when you get to the ninth place on the list does a truly rich country appear: Sweden.

Nye on Climate Change

Melting ice reveals ...

...caribou dung, marine reptiles, baskets, arrow shafts with the feathers intact, arrowheads, lashings, weapons, tunics, shoes and other implements, including a complete arrow shaft dating from 5,900 years ago. And, of course, people.

Water in Israel

Many years ago I visited Israel on a business trip. The sight that still stalks my mind is the blooming in the desert. After millennia, the Israelis were the first who were able to make the desert bloom. That is vital to Israel and they have developed more than one way of solving the problem.

They have developed a different method of irrigation - drip irrigation. It is a way of irrigating plants via a system of perforated pipes that water crops with judicious regularity. It reduces water usage and increases crop yield, resulting in as much as four times more produce for the same amount of water. Israel uses drip irrigation in 75 percent of its farms. Other places only use it in 5 percent. Yet, agriculture accounts for about 70 percent of water usage globally.

They can turn seawater into tap water. Some feel this is a bad idea. But it does produce drinkable water.

Perhaps, the most important aspect of Israel's water is that there is only one water authority that sets both policy and pricing for the whole country. They can get things done. Israel recycles more than 80 percent of its wastewater for reuse in agriculture and other industrial processes, which is quadruple the amount of the second largest wastewater recycler, Spain. In California, there’s still strong public distrust of such recycling, even after rigorous treatment. 

Only another 1,000 miles to go

Ernie Andrus, a 91-year-old World War II veteran, is running cross-country from California to Georgia. He is not doing it in one fell swoop. As of March he had run from California to Texas. I don't know how long it took him, but he plans on reaching Georgia in the next two years. He is running by himself, although he says, "I'm sure there are many others my age who could do what I'm doing, It's just not something they want to do."

He is running to raise money for the LST 325 Memorial, which hopes to bring Ernie's old World War II landing craft back to Normandy for the next D-Day commemoration.

"Every nation has dark spots in its past...

...and nowhere are those spots darker than in Germany. However, the greatness of a country is reflected in how it deals with this past and whether it critically examines it. In this respect, the United States is not the great nation it believes itself to be."

That is how Markus Feldenkirchen ends a commentary of racism in the U.S. He begins "The United States excels at dealing with the injustices of other countries. The US has been less successful, however, in conducting the same process when addressing the dark parts of its own past."

You should read the article.

A real fan

So, the Chicago Cubs fan is feeding his seven-month old son when a foul ball comes his way. He does what every true fan would do - catches the ball - and continues to feed his son.

Numbers can be confusing

Today's NY Times has an article entitled "Homegrown Radicals More Deadly Than Jihadis In U.S." The article is based on a report by New America, another Washington Research Center. The article reports that since 2015 "48 have been killed by extremists who are not Muslim, compared with 26 by self-proclaimed jihadists". So, I guess the term 'deadly' can be considered accurate. However, the report does not include the Newtown school or Colorado theater killings. Furthermore, the report states that 276 of the extremists were jihadists, while 183 were not.

The Northern Lights

Polling is more difficult in the 21st century

An article by Cliff Zukin, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research, brought back memories of the effect of a rising ownership of telephones had on forecasting the results of a presidential election, perhaps one in the late 1940s. Zukin ascribes a fair amount of the recent poor polling results to the rise of the cellphone. First of all, it has increased the cost of polling. The 1991 Telephone Consumer Protection  prohibits the calling of cellphones through automatic dialers. Paid staff now has to dial as well as poll. 

The response rate has also gone downhill. In the late 1970s, an 80 percent response rate was typical. By the late 1990s it was 36 percent; in 2014 it had sunk to 8 percent. Some pollsters have gone to the internet. But, here again there are problems. This time it's age and voting habits. While all but 3 percent of those ages 18 to 29 use the Internet, they made up just 13 percent of the 2014 electorate, according to the exit poll conducted by Edison Research. Some 40 percent of those 65 and older do not use the Internet, but they made up 22 percent of voters.