Unknowability

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One of our great difficulties, whether the subject is climate change or the economy, is the problem of decision-making in the face of uncertainty. We want to know the right answer, and the lack of one makes us uncomfortable. But, as Win Quigley points out, sometimes that’s just the way it is:

Every economist and pundit on every point along the political spectrum has an opinion about economic policy, and some of them are bound to be right. The problem is that there are no controlled experiments in economics. You can’t create a parallel economy to compare against the existing economy to see what works and what doesn’t. You don’t get a clean test tube in which to run your experiments. People do not hold still long enough to allow us to judge their response to new facts on the ground. We can’t stop new data from emerging.

This recession is like nothing we’ve ever seen before. The sad fact is that after gathering the data and making the best decisions we can, we’re still flying blind.

What Happens When the River Runs Dry?

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V.B. Price, in the Independent, has a must-read rumination on water constraints in middle Rio Grande planning:

Is the notion of “reinventing cities” in the American West less about new rail and other transportation infrastructure than it is about finally being honest about water and doing something about it?

But what could be done?

Must we place a moratorium on all new building in our region?

Must counties in the Middle Rio Grande Valley and adjacent communities actually do water planning together?

Do we finally have to have real numbers that add up, not projections based on funny math and politics?

Will we be forced to spend the money and time it takes to get an ever more accurate assessment of how much water our aquifers still actually contain?

Price is raising important questions here, but I think there are some potential answers that might not turn out the way he hopes. It gets back to the argument I’ve made in the past for disentangling land use and water planning tools. His list has some essential elements on it, including the need to do our water math better so we’re up front about what we actually have, and the need to coordinate water and land use planning across the various governmental jurisdictions in the middle Rio Grande that have responsibility for both.

But it would be possible to do the water planning in such a way that we provide sufficient water to allow the sort of growth patterns that Price abhors. We could, for example, decide we no longer want agriculture. I’d never argue in favor of that. I’m merely pointing out that, if water becomes the primary constraint as we plan our future, there are some potential outcomes that V.B. would not like.

Vinny

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I was happy to learn that, now that Albuquerque’s AAA ballclub is the Dodger’s, we’ll get Vin Scully on local radio. Here’s a bit of his poetry:

One and 1 to Harvey Kuenn. Now he’s ready: fastball, high, ball 2. You can’t blame a man for pushing just a little bit now. Sandy backs off, mops his forehead, runs his left index finger along his forehead, dries it off on his left pants leg. All the while Kuenn just waiting. Now Sandy looks in. Into his windup and the 2-1 pitch to Kuenn: swung on and missed, strike 2!

It is 9:46 p.m.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Realities of Cap and Trade

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From this morning’s Albuquerque Journal, a look at the difficulties in Congress as greenhouse gas regulation becomes real rather than an abstract exercise:

Sen. Jeff Bingaman, D-N.M., was one of 26 Democrats who joined Republicans last week in voting to make it harder for the Senate to act quickly on President Barack Obama’s greenhouse gas reduction proposals.

The Democratic defections mean that it will take 60 votes in the Senate, rather than a simple majority of 51, to get climate legislation passed this year. They came during a day of wrangling that signaled concerns about the potential cost of Obama’s proposals.

The votes show a discomfort in Congress with the idea that greenhouse gas reductions could substantially raise energy prices for business and consumers.

Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Nuclear Drift

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On our nation’s appalling* inability to make decisions about nuclear weapon policy:

In 1989, the Department of Energy told Congress that the old building was contaminated, with widespread corrosion, and asked for money to build a replacement.

A year later, Congress killed funding, saying the federal government needed to come up with an overarching plan for its nuclear arsenal and the infrastructure needed to maintain it.

In the two decades since, we have planned and replanned, formed commissions and task forces, that have never quite settled the question of what U.S. nuclear weapons are for, how many we need, and what sort of manufacturing and research infrastructure we need in response.

* It’s a column. I get a special dispensation allowing me to have opinions.

Anonymous Sources

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I did a kinda snarky, mean-spirited post last week criticicizing local politics blogger Joe Monahan. The guy bugs me because what he does seems, to many readers, to pass for new journalism. He’s an entertaining blogger, but his obsessive use of anonymous sources falls far short of what for me serves as useful journalism.

Matt over at FBIHOP has a nice discussion this afternoon of the issue:

In Monahan’s case, his anonymous “Alligators” always are pushing a certain issue. But we can’t analyze the reason someone is pushing a certain point of view because we are always missing a key piece of context from Monahan: The who.

At their most important, anonymous sources are underling government employees speaking truth to power at risk of their jobs. Those folks need to be protected. Monahan’s alligators, though, are just people who occupy some pocket of New Mexico politics idea space. By not naming them, Monahan exploits readers’ sense that he has some special information. It gives the message being sent a certain insiders’ cachet. But all it really does is obfuscate, allowing the alligators to get away with unaccountable spin.

Is the Western Climate Initiative tanking?

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Last week, I wrote a piece for the newspaper (adwalled) about the difficulties faced by greenhouse reduction advocates in New Mexico in getting their Western Climate Initiative legislation moving:

The difficulty in passing legislation here is mirrored in other states. Efforts in Montana, Arizona, Utah and Washington, which are also part of the Western Climate Initiative, have run into delays, raising questions about the necessity of state-by-state efforts to get legislation passed.

The troubles continue, according to this report from Tom Banse at Oregon Public Broadcasting:

Richard DeBolt: “We know the federal government is going to take action soon.  Why would we want to jump out in front when we don’t know what the structure is going to look like –who is going to be damaged, how it’s going to look — when you’re going to have a unified system running across the United States.”

In Olympia, in Salem, in Santa Fe, Phoenix, Salt Lake, and Helena, similar arguments are leading to the same outcome.

Utah and Arizona legislators went so far as to urge their governors to pull out of the Western climate group.  In the New Mexico and Montana legislatures, the idea never saw the light of day.  In Washington State, lawmakers considered and then quickly dropped the cap.

In Oregon, the process of watering down the greenhouse gas rules is underway.

The arguments here parallel those heard last week in the U.S. Senate in a very important way for those trying to understand the political reality of climate change action in the United States (see Roger Pielke Jr. for a discussion of the most important Senate votes). Move beyond the abstract notion of climate change action to specifics that have the potential to cost something, somewhere, to someone, and suddenly things get a whole lot harder.

The advantage, from an audience perspective, of music over painting

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Joshua Cooper Ramo’s got some great schtick his new book about Picasso that has me pondering again the remarkable intellectual trajectory that leads from the raw innovation of Les Demoiselles to the crisp completion of the thought in Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Lots of cubism after that point, but in some sense the space by Duchamp had been pretty thoroughly explored during that five-year period.

I’m way out of my element here, but I’ve been trying for years to complete the analogy between the invention of cubism and what happened in jazz between Kind of Blue (recorded 1959, the year of my birth) and the stuff in the mid-’60s, when Davis had just about finished working out the details and was ready to head off in a new direction (which, parenthetically, I’ve never quite understood).

My point here is simply this: much easier to pop in a CD and listen than it is to jet off to Philadelphia to stare at Duchamp.