The Rhetorical Attractiveness of “Energy Independence”

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David Henderson on energy independence:

[T]he case for being “dependent” on other countries for oil is the same as the case for being dependent on other countries for bananas or coffee. At some tariff-protected price, the United States could be self-sufficient in bananas or coffee. If the price were high enough, someone would grow bananas and coffee plants in greenhouses. But why would we want that? Why would we want to pay more for coffee and bananas than we need to? Another way of saying that we would pay more is that we would give up more of our resources (capital, labor, and land) to have domestic bananas and coffee than we now give up by producing other things with these resources and using the proceeds to buy coffee and bananas more cheaply abroad. We would be poorer. The reasoning doesn’t change when the good is oil. By preventing people from importing oil, either with a ban on imports or a tariff on oil, the government would make us poorer.

I Write About Iris

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My friend Jim Belshaw, who writes a newspaper column and has long had a love-hate relationship with blogging, sent along an Atlantic essay by Andrew Sullivan about blogging. Sullivan was one of the first bloggers I read who deserved the label, as it has now come to be known. But before blogging was the thing it is today, I was introduced to the phenomemon by a wonderful site called Advogato, a gathering place for free software developers who wrote mostly about what they (and we, for I was one of their tribe then) were working on.

One of Sullivan’s central points involves the way blogging creates a record of what you were thinking as you were thinking it, which sent me back to the spring of 2001, when I joined Advogato and started blogging myself. Even then, I wrote about iris and killdeer:

Lissa spent a good part of yesterday weeding in our huge iris bed in the front yard, picking through the plants. “It’s like getting reacquainted with old friends,” she said.

I had the same feeling this morning when I saw a pair of killdeer on my morning bike ride. It’s finally getting warm enough to ride outside in the mornings, so I’ve been heading up the bike path along the flood control channel. There’s a big bend in the channel where the water slows down and drops silt, and it turns into a little wetland every year, despite the flood control people’s best efforts to keep it scooped out. That’s where the killdeer hang out, pretty little birds with a white collar and a cheerful song. Old friends.

Neutrinos are not a breakfast cereal

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I still do write about science now and then:

In an unused alcove at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, Stanford physicist Giorgio Gratta and his colleagues have built a high-tech lab to try to measure the weight of what scientists call “the little neutral one,” one of the most mysterious of the tiny subatomic particles that make up all matter in our universe.

“The mass of the neutrino is something we don’t know,” said Roger Nelson, chief scientist at the Department of Energy-run WIPP.

Don’t Call It “Drought”

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A reader familiar with my longstanding interest in how one defines “drought” sent along this interesting story from the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:

Federal Government-selected experts want people to start using the word “dryness” to describe Australia’s worst drought in a century.

The word “drought” makes farmers feel bad, says the Government’s hand-picked Drought Policy Review Expert Social Panel.

The politically-correct push also aims to make farmers accept that drier weather is here to stay, and is not a temporary crisis, the panel’s newly released report said.

I’ve not read the underlying report, but I suspect they’re on to something here. One of the problems with the use of the word “drought” to describe climatic conditions that are essentially the dry side of the normal range of variability is that it lets you off the hook. We see that here in the southwestern U.S. all the time. We take the wet side of the probability distribution in stride, not noticing the bounty, but then when we get to the dry side, we call it a “drought” and act all surprised.

Expert Advice

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David Glenn had a fascinating piece in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week about the struggle by academic economists to be relevant in the current fiscal crisis:

[N]ow that the dust is beginning to settle in Washington, many academic economists have the gnawing feeling that during moments of crisis, they don’t have much ability to sway public policy.

It’s a meaty piece that serves as a telling example of the broader problem of expert advice in government. The real money quote came at the very end, echoing a problem that I see in many areas that I cover as a journalist – the disconnect between the views of the expert and the realities of how the system works. The person speaking is economist James K. Galbraith:

“The question is not so much what economists need to say to policy makers, but what kind of policy education economists need in order to be able to intelligently understand the constraints that policy makers operate under.”