If the price is right….
Lissa put 16 bags of iris out by the curb Friday. Two left this morning (Sunday.)
Is the Western Climate Initiative tanking?
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
Joshua Cooper Ramo’s got some great schtick his new book
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
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.
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Filling the Drinking Fountains
On the political tension over water conservation:
Why should I save water when all it does is enable more sprawl?
People Seem to Favor Action on Climate Change Until….
Pietro Nivola at Brookings has a new discussion paper that provides, among other things, a useful discussion of where the American public is on climate change.
Superficial polling suggests relatively strong support, but when you probe deeper, the cracks show:
Majorities, in sum, dutifully nod at abstractions-for example, “doing more” to combat climate change. They may even appear to embrace the general labels of particular policy proposals (like “cap-and-trade”). And they say the Democrats can “handle” things better. But they jump ship as soon as they learn that “handling” (or “doing more” about) climate change is not a free ride. For environmental progressives, that reality cannot be ducked indefinitely. Their partisan rivals will make a potent case that adopting, say, a cap-and-trade program will effectively impose a tax increase.
This resonated for me after spending the day Friday talking to folks in Washington about what happened this past week in the U.S. Senate, with a series of votes that suggested enthusiasm for free climate lunches and not so much for action that might incur any costs.
Squid?
Really, Really Giant Squid
I have a standing policy here at the Inkstain News Center against quoting anonymous sources, but this is too sweet to pass up:
My alligators tell me that Joe Monahan’s college nickname was “Squid”.
“Alligators” is NM politics blogger Monahan’s word for his anonymous sources, who tell him all kinds of important stuff, some of which is true. The alligators have propelled Monahan to worldwide fame. Just ask Monahan, who noted in a recent post that the importance of the alligators has been
noted by the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Roll Call, Congressional Quarterly, the BBC, PBS NewsHour, the Santa Fe New Mexican, Santa Fe Reporter, Real Clear Politics, National Public Radio, NM Independent, the Alibi, KOB-TV, KRQE-TV, KASA-TV, KOB Radio, KSFR-FM Radio, C-SPAN, Voice of America and the Las Cruces Sun-News, among many others.
Wow! Good job, Joe, thanks for keeping track. And it clearly shows how prescient your college colleagues were in calling you squid, what with 300 species and all those arms and stuff. Squid rocks. (Squids rock?)
(I’d link to Monahan’s post with the list of media kudoing, but I can’t figure out how to get his permalinks to work, sorry. There’s obviously a reason my work has never been mentioned on Voice of America. I’m no squid.)
Elephant Diaries: What Will Save Newspapers? Boobs!
Stuff I Wrote Elsewhere: Nuke Cleanup Edition
Money for nuclear weapons cleanup in the stimulus bill (adwalled):
The federal government will pump $384 million into New Mexico’s nuclear institutions to clean up and dispose of old Cold War waste in one of the largest economic stimulus investments in the state.
Los Alamos National Laboratory will get $212 million between now and 2011 to clean up radioactive waste on an old lab site next to the community of Los Alamos.
No Joke
This is not an April fool’s joke.
Elephant Diaries: Leveraging Audience
Regular readers will have noticed that I’m a fan of David Zetland, the water economist. He has a great blog that is widely read in the water wonk community. Reading it has helped me a great deal in understanding some key economic principles that underly water issues I follow.
But there’s a problem. A guy like Zetland in the new media ecosystem appeals to a self-selected audience of people interested in the issues he’s raising, either because they agree, or disagree and want to argue, or are just trying to understand. But for his work to have the necessary reach to influence policy outcomes, Zetland’s ideas need to reach beyond the self-selected water wonk world. How to do this?
By infecting people like me with his ideas, or perhaps, my colleague Sean Olson, who wrote about water pricing in this morning’s newspaper:
The logic goes that people notice slight increases in their water bills, but it isn’t enough of a bother to change their watering habits. But when a bill three times the size of their last one shows up, they burn the hose and post a guard at the bathroom door. “If the price is high enough, people will pay attention,” water economist David Zetland said in a recent interview.
Sean pushes Zetland’s message beyond the people who would not self-select.