Connect the dots: Harpers on China, The Economist on GE

It's not all that hard to connect these two dots. The Economist reports that GE is making a huge bet on the importance of "green technologies":

The greening of General Electric | A lean, clean electric machine | Economist.com

NEXT month General Electric's corporate bosses will drop a bombshell on the hard-charging managers of its global businesses. In future they will be judged not only by all the usual measures, such as return on capital, that investors typically care about: they will also be held accountable for helping to save the planet.

Every GE business unit will have to cut its emissions of carbon dioxide (CO₂), the main greenhouse gas (GHG) behind global warming, by a different target.

... GE's new goal is to cut its overall GHG emissions by 2012 to 1% below their level in 2004. That might not sound ambitious, but if no climate policies are enacted, the company's projected revenue growth would increase its GHG emissions by 40% above 2004 levels.

... Jeffrey Immelt, GE's boss, is leading the effort himself, campaigning for it both inside and outside the company, as well as backing it with large amounts of new investment.

... Mr Immelt is so convinced that clean technologies will be the future of GE that, invoking the colour of American money, he has made his new mantra: “green is green”.

... The company vows to double its revenues from 17 clean-technology businesses, ranging from renewable energy and hydrogen fuel cells, to water filtration and purification systems, to cleaner aircraft and locomotive engines.

... Mr Immelt and other senior GE officials now publicly proclaim that global warming is real, and also call for American government regulations to deal with it.

... Back in the 1980s and 1990s, many blue-chip firms, ranging from DuPont and Dow to big French and British water companies such as Suez, forged into environmental services. Many were confidently predicting long-term double-digit growth and some invested heavily in developing-country markets.

Alas, by the late 1990s many of these firms had scaled back their investments...

Meanwhile, Harpers has published a long survey of China (emphases mine). It's sympathetic, bullish, and tries to avoid cliche and extreme simplification. Towards the end of the article it gets down to brass tacks (btw, multiply all numbers by 1.8 to include India and the rest of the industrializing world)...

Harpers: Scenes from China's Industrial Revolution

... It used to be said that the point of travel was to see your own home more clearly. So let's look. When you're standing in Shanghai, at the city's urban-planning exhibition, admiring the basketball-court-sized model of the city's future plan, with every skyscraper and apartment complex carefully detailed, you just viscerally know that there are two countries that really count right now. You just viscerally know that this is the story that will define the future. China and the United States are now the world's biggest consumers of raw material, and of food, and of energy. Are they therefore morally equivalent?

... Sometime between 2025 and 2030, China will pass the United States as the largest carbon emitter in the world - already it produces sixteen percent of the world's CO2 compared with our 25 percent. That is, they are now joining us in the task of undermining the planet's physics and chemistry.

... We have nearly the same number of cars as we have people. In China the number of automobiles is growing fast. But if the Chinese sell six million cars this year, that will be eleven million less than the United States - in a population more than four times as large.

In fact, the size of China's population queers every discussion of numbers.... Zhao Ang, my translator, has as much right to the sky as I do, which is to say as much right to a car or a big house. And measuring by people, in 2025 or 2030, when China passes the United States as the world's largest carbon emitter, the average Chinese will still be producing only a quarter as much carbon as the average American. And of course it goes deeper than that - the reason the atmosphere is filled to the danger point with carbon is because we've already been filling it for two centuries, burning coal and oil to get rich while the Chinese have been staying poor. As Ma Jun - a daring environmentalist who's taken big risks to write his books - told me one day, "Nearly eighty percent of the carbon dioxide has come from 200 years of the industrial world. Let's be realistic. Those historic burdens have to be shouldered by those countries that have enjoyed the benefits." In any just scheme, it's not morally required of the Chinese to help solve global warming, any more than it's your kids' responsibility to work out the problems in your marriage.

... it seems intuitively obvious when you're in China that the goal of the twenty-first century must somehow be to simultaneously develop the economies of the poorest parts of the world and undevelop those of the rich - to transfer enough technology and wealth that we're able to meet somewhere in the middle, with us using less energy so that they can use more, and eating less meat so that they can eat more.

... try to imagine the political possibilities in America of taking Chinese aspirations seriously - of acknowledging that there isn't room for two of us to behave in this way, and that we don't own the rights to our lifestyle simply because we got there first...

There's a rich history of mis-predicting ecological trainwrecks. Malthus got it wrong (ok, except for Rwanda where he got it right) because several breakthroughs in food production moved his collapse into the indefinite future. Worldwatch got it wrong yearly for the past 30 years because they way too confident about timelines (and thus earned both fame and infamy). If we do avoid this trainwreck, however, it will most likely be through new technologies -- not some dramatic enlightenment of the American (or European) troglodyte. GE is making a bet on a 5-20 year timeline in which those technologies will become fundamental.

I think it's a safe bet. If it doesn't pay off, market cap will be the least of our concerns.

Warren Buffet on the US trade deficit

Buffett wrote Squanderville versus Thriftville (Warren Buffet over a year ago. It's a good read. I'd like to see DeLong comment on it.

The spirit wanes -- the Onion

The Onion reports on America's return to baseline:

Important Christmas Lessons Already Forgotten | The Onion - America's Finest News Source

... The positive, soul-enriching sentiments associated with the holiday season are shared by almost all Americans, regardless of religious beliefs or cultural backgrounds,' Samuelson said. 'But it is only through our regular mean-spirited shallowness the rest of the year that the spirit of Christmas can, by contrast, move us so deeply, deluding the populace into thinking their lives are actually beautiful. If everybody behaved so kindly to one another all year round, Christmas wouldn't seem special at all. And then, the magic of Christmas would be lost forever, swallowed up by a year-round sense of basic human decency that would rob the holidays of their warm glow, ruining Christmas for all the little children of the world.'

Excellent! One of their better pieces.

bin Laden is dead (I think)

Another message from Zawahiri ...

BBC NEWS | Middle East | Al-Qaeda leader airs new message

.. Zawahiri is likely to have made the tape before Mr Bush gave his comments. Al-Jazeera says the video carried the date of the Muslim lunar month which ended in December.

Zawahiri is regarded as Osama Bin Laden's right-hand man. The two have evaded capture since US-led forces brought down the Taleban regime in Afghanistan in 2001 following the 9/11 attacks on the US.

I've believed for about a year that bin Laden was dead. It happens. He has lots of enemies, he's not young, he was rumored for a time to have kidney and/or vascular disease, he's been traveling rough. It's hard to believe a megalomaniac like him could be quiet for so long.

Maybe we ought to stop talking about capturing bin Laden and start talking about getting Zawahiri. I've long thought he was he was the more important of the two.

It pays to be a parasite: The cat

I've half-jokingly praised the parasitic brilliance of the dog. Arguably, however, dogs are symbiotes. We gave them our garbage, they cleaned the premises. Physically weak humans could ally with physically strong dogs, given evolution more playgrounds to tweak the mind.

Domestic cats, on the other hand, are pure[1] parasites:

DNA Offers New Insight Concerning Cat Evolution - New York Times

With each migration, evolutionary forces morphed the pantherlike patriarch of all cats into a rainbow of species, from ocelots and lynxes to leopards, lions and the lineage that led to the most successful cat of all, even though it has mostly forsaken its predatory heritage: the cat that has induced people to pay for its board and lodging in return for frugal displays of affection.

How did evolution shape the cat, so it was so able to prey so effectively upon human weaknesses? One clue (also from this week's NYT Science) is that human's are programmed to respond to anything resembling a helpless infant. Cats appear to have evolved to take advantage of that weak point.

One can only speculate on the alliance that evolution might build between cats and toxoplasma. It would make sense that toxoplasma, a rapidly evolving parasite, could alter the behavior of both cats and humans to further its own agenda ...

I do love ecology.

[1] Ok, so they killed rats, mice and other "vermin". Sigh. Guess they were symbiotes once too ...

The alternative to an American police state: The transparent society

Yesterday I wrote of the case for an American police state. I imagined that Cheney, reading a post 9/11 secret report on the falling cost of havoc, could have logically resolved that he was obligated to create a de facto police state in America.

I wrote that I was sympathetic to the dilemma faced by my imaginary VP, but that there were better paths that Cheney's secrecy had foreclosed. Maybe my virtual Cheney felt he had no choice -- that Americans weren't ready to think about the problems the anthrax attack and 9/11 exposed.

At the same time I wrote, David Brin, author of The Transparent Society (suddenly sold out on Amazon!), explored one of the alternatives (emphases mine):

Contrary Brin: Preventing Tyranny...part one

Unlike nearly every other opponent of the Bush Administration, I am far less incensed over their efforts -- through vehicles like the PATRIOT Act and the NSA -- to empower our paid protector caste (e.g. the FBI etc) with better access to wiretaps and other powers of surveillance. Their increased ability to see is inevitable, and not intrinsically worrisome. Indeed, in this new century, we will simply have to get used to the fact that elites will see very, very well. Get used to it.

But this need not be the end of freedom. What I hammer relentlessly is the point about reciprocal accountability -- that average citizens must fight, like demons, to retain our ability to look back! To ensure that the protector caste can never get away with spying or meddling or doing anything else unsupervised and unscrutinized by a citizenry who are both knowing and fiercely determined to the bosses of this civilization. To stay free.

Rather than focusing on a few rogue wiretaps, it is the Bushite frenzy for secrecy, dismantling every tool of accountability and oversight, that we should find far more terrifying.

The utter insanity of our situation cannot be over-emphasized. Ask ANY of your conservative friends what their reaction would have been, had Bill Clinton done 1/10 of any of these things. Take ANY ONE category. From busting the budget to relentless secrecy, demolition of our military readiness, torture, domestic spying, ruination of all our alliances, support for monopolies, the taking of bribes in exchange for pork contracts, interpreting every law as optional under the “Commander in Chief” clause, and utter destruction of international goodwill...

The comparison to Clinton is a distraction, but Brin's key point is that we cannot prevent ubiquitious surveilance. It's too late now, the technology to do this came far too fast for the bulk of mankind to understand it.

I am very troubled by this reality, by I have conceded that the falling cost of havoc alone probably requires us to live in a fishbowl. The challenge is -- can we both watched and free? Can we choose a 'transparent society' rather than a police state?

We can't return to the transient age of anonymity (at least in the physical world) -- that short period of urban and roaming life when people could be alone. The easy alternative, the alternative chosen by inaction, is Cheney/Bush's police state. The hard alternative is the Transparent Society. Unless you can think of something better ...

The consequences of NSA intercepts

Wild rumors circulate that the NSA intercepts targeted CNN's Christiane Amanpour: Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal: A Riddle Inside a Mystery Wrapped in an Enigma.... Whether the rumors are true are not, it is a credit to the Bush legacy that they are certainly believable. The interesting parts John Aravosis posting (via DeLong) is the exploration of what it would mean to wiretap a well connected journalist.

One would learn a great number of things that might be of interest to various governmental bodies, none of which are criminal or immoral. Of course if one were investigating a major breach of national security, such as the leaking of the NSA's intercepts program, journalists would be the key figures to target. After all, by one or two degrees of separation it is certain they are connected to al Qaeda. (I met Reza Pehlavi in college, Reza must have met the younger bin Laden, therefore I'm connected to bin Laden. Bush, of course, must be deeply connected to bin Laden.)

Welcome to Bush's America.

Will journalists begin using high grade encryption in their everyday activities? I'm surprised high grade encryption is still legal ...

Cats did get around

New research has clarified the lineage of cats. Turns out that over millions of years they circulated in and out of Africa, Asia and North America, splitting and meeting along the way. Interestingly invaders didn't seem to wipe out indigenous cats -- in contrast to the expansion of humans.

Cat-Blogging from Deep Time. The Loom: A blog about life, past and future

...The scientists were able to reconstruct the evolutionary tree of cats with a great deal of statistical confidence. Their results are published in this week's Science (link to come). I've put the illustrations from the paper at the bottom for those who like to revel in the gorey details. What's particularly neat about the paper is that it offers a hypothesis for how cats spread around the world. The researchers came up with this hypothesis by looking at where cats are today, and then mapping their locations onto the evolutionary tree.

The common ancestor of all living cats, according to their results, lived in Asia about ten million years ago. This cat's descendants split into two branches. One led to lions, jaguars, tigers, leapards, snow leopards, and cloud leopards. The other branch gave rise to all other cats. These early cats remained in Asia until 8.5 million years ago, when new lineages moved into the New World and Africa. The New World immigrants gave rise to bobcats, couggars, lynxes, ocelots, bobcats, and other species found in the Western Hemisphere today. The African migrants were the ancestors of today's servals and other small cat species.

But cats have a way off wandering. The ancestors of domestic cats moved back from North America back into Asia around 6.5 million years ago. Lynxes moved back as well about 2 million years ago, spreading west until they reached Spain. The ancestors of today's mountain lions in the New World also produced another lineage that moved back into Asia and eventually wound up in Africa, where it became today's cheetahs. Other big cats moved into Africa at around the same time--the cousins of tigers and snow leopards in Asia moved through the Sinai peninsula and evolved into African lions. But close cousins of the lions moved into the New World, evolving into jaguars.

The case for a police state in America

When Molly Ivins writes about the NSA's domestic monitoring, even the few who read her work will assume that comments about a "police state" are a rhetorical flourish. Cheney wants a more powerful president, but surely he does not seek a police state? That makes no sense.

Or maybe it does.

Imagine (scary thought) that there are people like me who work in government. Imagine that in October of 2001 they were asked to fully consider the implications of the 9/11 attack, and the even more novel anthrax attack that came later. (Anyone remember the anthrax? No, I didn't think so.)

Imagine that they produced something like this. To be precise, not the somewhat chaotic web page, but rather a set of nicely bound reports containing one important idea.

The idea that the real problem was not al Qaeda.

The idea that the real problem was that falling cost of havoc. The notion that in a world where exponential growth in wealth and technology was providing the offensive capabilities of nation states to small groups and even individuals.

Imagine that Cheney read that report, and believed it. In this imaginary world al Qaeda is a wake-up call for a much bigger and intractable problem. A problem too big and scary to discuss broadly, or to seek public input on. Alas, Cheney would then miss out on a lot of alternative ideas and paths one could follow, but he's a politician. He probably understands the capabilities of the American public better than I. He may believe that only a few, only the strong, should bear this burden and carry it to the logical conclusion.

The logical conclusion, or at least one of them, is to implement ubiquitous surveilance -- to monitor and to act pre-emptively. Not just al Qaeda -- because they're yesterday's threat. PETA could be a big threat tomorrow. Since the justification of this action is too grim to present publicly, the surveilance must be secret, and centrally controlled. The law cannot be changed without revealing the deeper issues, so the law must be broken. In other words, a police state must be implemented.

I won't say what path I would have taken had I Cheney's power. I don't think it would have been the path I've outlined, but obviously I would have taken those imaginary reports quite seriously.

I wonder if America is ready to talk about the real problems we face, and what our options are. No? Sigh. Too bad, but I think you're right. Then a police state it shall be ...

Skijoring goes mainstream

In 1995 I had one of the first web pages on the net about skijoring. I'd started with my buddy Molly in early 90s on the advice of our vet in Michigan's Upper Peninsula (aka Alaska south). Molly now rolls in celestial fish, but even into her old age she loved the harness and lead -- even though she didn't do much pulling after age 12 or so. That old web page still shows up in the first page of a Google search, which says something about the gravitational attraction of old web pages.

Now, happily, Skijoring has made it to the popular culture -- via the New York Times:

Fitness - Skijoring - Fashion - New York Times:

Skijoring (pronounced skee-JOAR-ing) has long been practiced in Alaska and Scandinavia, where sled-dog sports are part of the local culture. But in the last five years it has gained momentum in places like Vermont, upstate New York, Michigan, Colorado and Minnesota and now has a following among thousands of recreational skiers and their dogs, said Tim White, the president of the International Federation of Sleddog Sports, in Minnesota. Cross-country ski areas have opened hundreds of miles of trails to skiers and their pets, and new skijoring clubs, equipment makers, races, instructional clinics and Web sites cater to the converts.

Participation in skijoring has grown as people find that many breeds of dog are fit and strong enough to pull their owners. Though pugs and bichon friss won't qualify, active healthy dogs that weigh at least 35 pounds can skijor. Arctic sled dogs like Siberian huskies and Alaskan malamutes are popular race breeds. But Labrador retrievers, Rhodesian ridgebacks, Great Danes, greyhounds, border collies and even standard poodles can also participate. A giant schnauzer is hardly an arctic sled dog, but Raven took to skijoring with little hesitation, Ms. Offerman said.

If not for the waning of winter snow cover, the sport would be much bigger. Alas, in many parts of America snow cover is only a memory. Molly and I ended up doing more "skatejoring" than skijoring. Inline skating with a harnessed dog, however, is a sport for the terminally insane.

Changes to comments

I've changed the Blogger comments settings. Anyone can comment now, there's no longer a requirement to register with Blogger. All comments have to be approved for now, but I'll see how much junk I get. Maybe the very annoying OCR Turing test (type distorted letters) will suffice to limit spam. (I dislike that test intensely since screen readers for visually impaired persons can't pass it.)

Poindexter's dreaded TIA was a mouse compared to Bush's NSA

I remember the concerns about Poindexter's TIA initiative. I also remember being intensely skeptical that it had really been "killed" by public "outrage". Slate makes a convincing case that not only was TIA not "killed", but that the current NSA program goes well beyond what TIA advocated:

Tinker, Tailor, Miner, Spy - Why the NSA's snooping is unprecedented in scale and scope. By Shane Harris and Tim Naftali

The magnitude of the current collection effort is unprecedented and indeed marks a shift in how the NSA spies in the United States. The current program seems to involve a remarkable level of cooperation with private companies and extraordinarily expansive data-mining of questionable legality. Before Bush authorized the NSA to expand its domestic snooping program after 9/11 in the secret executive order, the agency had to stay clear of the "protected communications" of American citizens or resident aliens unless supplied by a judge with a warrant. The program President Bush authorized reportedly allows the NSA to mine huge sets of domestic data for suspicious patterns, regardless of whether the source of the data is an American citizen or resident. The NSA needs the help of private companies to do this because commercial broadband now carries so many communications. In an earlier age, the NSA could pick up the bulk of what it needed by tapping into satellite or microwave transmissions. "Now," as the agency noted in a transition document prepared for the incoming Bush administration in December 2000, "communications are mostly digital, carry billions of bits of data, and contain voice, data and multimedia. They are dynamically routed, globally networked and pass over traditional communications means such as microwave or satellite less and less."

The agency used to search the transmissions it monitors for key words, such as names and phone numbers, which are supplied by other intelligence agencies that want to track certain individuals. But now the NSA appears to be vacuuming up all data, generally without a particular phone line, name, or e-mail address as a target. Reportedly, the agency is analyzing the length of a call, the time it was placed, and the origin and destination of electronic transmissions. Those details would be crucial in mining the data for patterns—according to the officials the Times cited, the goal of the NSA's eavesdropping system.

I am not surprised, btw, that there's no real public reaction to the NSA disclosures. At least 30% of Americans are ready to declare Bush dictator for life, so they're not concerned. Another 30%, including myself, assumed the NSA was doing this, so it's hard for us to fake being shocked and amazed. Another 30% is completely clueless. That leaves 10% to be outraged, and that's not enough to sell any papers.

Update: Molly Ivins has a terrific summary of the entire story with some historical perspective.

bosons go with forces, fermions with stuff

Cosmic Variance sent me to bosons and fermions, allegedly all literate people should know the difference. I can't keep 'em straight, so since the best way to learn something is to write it, here goes.

Bosons are immaterial. Bosons overlap, they hold things together -- or push them apart. They are Force particles. Photons are Bosons. The undiscovered Graviton is a Boson. The also undiscovered Higg's Boson is thought to provide things with Mass (mass = E/c**2).

Fermions, even though they inconveniently start with the letter F, they are "stuff". They take up space. They exclude one another. Protons, neutrons, electrons, mosts (all?) quarks and leptons are Fermions. They are "Firm".

Why are Fermions and Bosons called "particles" when Bosons are ephemeral? Bahh. I vote for banning the word "particle".

Lost Luggage Lessons

For the 2nd time in 3 years we lost luggage on a holiday trip to Montreal -- on a direct NWA flight!

This time it wasn't security holding a bag, or the airline running out of room, or someone misfiling a bag. Our 3 kids were slow moving through Trudeau (Dorval's) endless aerobic corridors (the secret to Quebecois physique) and by the time we got to the carousel a harried traveler had grabbed the wrong bag -- ours.

It turned up in Toronto on Air Canada and was delivered to my parent's home. The airline did fine really, but the process is a royal pain. Here are a few tips I learned:

1. Northwest has a web site for tracking lost luggage. I didn't see this on the lost luggage paperwork, it would have saved us some calls. I came across it by accident.
2. The silly luggage tags airlines provide are shredded in transit about half the time. Put identification in the bag and buy tougher tags.
3. All wheeled bags look alike to travelers impaired by age, disability, inexperience, stress, hunger, etc. Ribbons tear off. Duct tape won't adhere to many bags. I'm looking for brightly colored tough nylon cable ties -- a few in strategic places would have prevented loss of my wheeled bag.
4. If a bag is lost for over 24 hours you can be reimbursed for up to $50 of "essentials". Unfortunately the list of "essentials" was last updated in 1950. A power adapter for my laptop is far more important than a clean shirt.
5. Speaking of power adapters, when I lost the bag I started realizing how hard, if not impossible, it would be to replace some of the gear in it. Clothes are easy to replace, a G3 iBook AV cable may be impossible to find. Montreal is not a tiny city, but I found only one store that had an iBook power adapter on the premises. It's a pain, but these things need to be carried on.
6. AAA and AMEX don't automatically provide lost luggage insurance. Homeowners does cover it, but we have a $1000 deductible. My AMEX card allows me to insure up to $500 for $5/flight or $39/traveler/year if the trip is charged to the same card. I'm not sure the insurance is worth it really; for me the problem is more the hassle of finding replacements than the insurance costs. Domestic coverage by airlines is pretty good, but international coverage sucks -- maybe $250 for a typical bag ($9/pound).
   

Check out this reference too.

Lessons in business:

Slate has an excellent article on the misfortunes of cafe owners. I must confess the cafes I frequent seem to have their owners on the premises all the time. This reminds me of a essay about running a new england bed and breakfast. The essay was written by a famed Ivy league economist in the 1950s or so (I'll update this post with the name when I remember it). He loved the B&Bs near his hobby farm; he considered them a great way for the city to donate money to the country. (Emphases mine, the percent breakdown is worth memorizing.)

Bitter Brew - I opened a charming neighborhood coffee shop. Then it destroyed my life. By Michael Idov

The failure of a small cafe is not a question of competence. It is a sad given. The logistics of a food establishment that seats between 20 and 25 people (which roughly corresponds to the definition of 'cozy') are such that the place will stay afloat—barely—as long as its owners spend all of their time on the job. There is a golden rule, long cherished by restaurateurs, for determining whether a business is viable. Rent should take up no more than 25 percent of your revenue, another 25 percent should go toward payroll, and 35 percent should go toward the product. The remaining 15 percent is what you take home. There's an even more elegant version of that rule: Make your rent in four days to be profitable, a week to break even. If you haven't hit the latter mark in a month, close.

A place that seats 25 will have to employ at least two people for every shift: someone to work the front and someone for the kitchen (assuming you find a guy who will both uncomplainingly wash dishes and reliably whip up pretty crepes; if you've found that guy, you're already in better shape than most NYC restaurateurs. You're also, most likely, already in trouble with immigration services). Budgeting $15 for the payroll for every hour your charming cafe is open (let's say 10 hours a day) relieves you of $4,500 a month. That gives you another $4,500 a month for rent and $6,300 to stock up on product. It also means that to come up with the total needed $18K of revenue per month, you will need to sell that product at an average of a 300 percent markup.

It's a great article. Tragically pastries are a money sink. I love pastries.