We subsidize ethanol so we can use it instead of gasoline in our cars. The price of corn rises. Poor folk in Mexico can’t afford their staple food:
Mexico is in the grip of the worst tortilla crisis in its modern history. Dramatically rising international corn prices, spurred by demand for the grain-based fuel ethanol, have led to expensive tortillas. That, in turn, has led to lower sales for vendors such as Rosales and angry protests by consumers.
More (sub. or ad req.) on the question of when a “secret” is not really “secret”:
In the past, the annual review was made public immediately on request. But policies implemented in 2003 granted agency employees widespread discretion to mark documents “official use only,” delaying or preventing the release of many documents once routinely made available.
The NNSA’s Sandia report card is unclassified, meaning it contains no secrets involving nuclear weapons or other national security matters. It has fallen instead into an expanding gray area of government information that taxpayers cannot see even though it is not legally “secret.”
Congressional investigators last year reported that the NNSA’s parent agency, the Department of Energy, held “many millions of pages” of such documents.
Any Department of Energy employee can mark a document off-limits to public view, and members of the public have little recourse short of a formal Freedom of Information Act request, which can take months to years to process.
Use of such quasi-secret designations “has escalated sharply over the last several years,” said Steven Aftergood, an expert on government secrecy policies who works for the Federation of American Scientists in Washington, D.C.
I’ll probably lose whatever dirty hippie cred I had left, but this is the car I lust after – Carroll Shelby’s Cobra. I mean, not just the car Shelby designed, but the one he designed for himself:
“It’s a special car. It would do just over three seconds to 60 (mph), 40 years ago,” Shelby told the crowd before the sale.
“I killed a buzzard with it,” he said. “Nasty, nasty.”
The collision of nuclear power and climate change is one of the more fascinating political and public policy debates afoot. Today’s case in point: a Financial Times story about a new Deutsche Bank study:
Germany will miss its CO2 emission targets, face rising electricity prices and become “dramatically” more reliant on Russian gas if it keeps to its policy of phasing out nuclear energy, a new study warns.
The 60-page paper by Deutsche Bank will add to the pressure on Angela Merkel, chancellor, to renegotiate the phase-out deal agreed by the previous government in 2000, despite her pledge not to reopen the controversial debate.
Rising concern about global warming and energy security has sparked a lively dispute in Ms Merkel’s Christian Democrat-led grand coalition government about the wisdom of renouncing nuclear energy. Michael Glos, the conservative economics minister, has campaigned vigorously against the phase-out, triggering equally vigorous opposition from Sigmar Gabriel, the Social Democratic environment minister.
Re my post earlier today about my snowy, muddy backyard, it’s worth pointing out that Albuquerque’s only received a total of 0.05 inch of precip since Jan. 1 at the airport, (0.25 at my house), well below normal for the month. It’s a late December storm that left things so muddy.
David Roberts, who has gotten a lot of leftie blogosphere traction with his dirty hippie post, is at it again.
Here’s David, describing the point he made on a conservative talk show (“one of the B-list Limbaughs”) yesterday:
The IPCC is one of the most rigorous scientific processes ever developed, and its new report pegs it at greater than 90% confidence that humanity is driving recent warming.
Here’s David a couple of weeks back defending his willingness to abandon the consensus:
Yes, we have to leave science to the scientists. But science is not a priesthood that can or should impose quietude on the rest of us. Our informed gut feelings about how things will turn out are legitimate. People make statements beyond what’s strictly supported by the peer-reviewed evidence all the time. For some reason, internet wonks seem to hold public advocacy on global warming to a strangely prudish set of standards. We don’t impose these kinds of strictures in other areas.
One of the difficulties in thinking about drought conditions is the tendency to look out your window. Out mine, there’s a nice little blanket of snow, and I’ve got to kick snow or mud off my feet when I come in out of the backyard. But the West is a big and exquisitely interconnected place, and the fact that Albuquerque’s been wet doesn’t begin to tell the story.
David Miskus, in the latest federal drought monitor, points out the contradiction in his assessment of southwest conditions:
Since October 1, basin precipitation has averaged only half to two-thirds of normal, and Jan. 16 SWC (ed: snow water content) was around half of normal, including the Sierra Nevada and major ranges in Nevada, Arizona, and southwestern New Mexico.
You can see that on the Western Regional Climate Center map above – all those bits of orange and yellow and even red across the southwest. You’ve got to get all the way over to central Colorado and New Mexico before you begin to see normal to above-normal precipitation. Those are the places most of us live – Denver and the east slope communities in Colorado, Albuquerque in New Mexico – but those are places that only contribute modestly to the region’s water supplies.
Some reservoir level numbers suggest the extent of the dilemma. As of Jan. 1:
So you Colorado and New Mexico residents feeling all wet and happy take note: all is not quite as it appears out the back window.
It’s quiet Saturday morning in Albuquerque, the sort of quiet you get when a light blanket of snow dampens the sound and keeps everyone inside, including the dogs. We’re going to be in trouble today when the mailman comes. There’ll be no dogs out to protect us.
I had a college chum named Brian Muir who was a serious Deadhead. During those years I was working in radio, as was Brian, and it was a tossup as to who was forced to deal with more offensive music. I was working for KEXI – “the valley’s entertainer” – a station that played “adult contemporary” – Barry Manilow and the like. In those days, before satellite feeds, canned music at stations like that came on these big reel-to-reel tapes, and we had a computer that would mix from one tape deck to the next: hot hits on one machine, instrumentals on another (to segue into the newscasts) and a couple of machines that played classic adult contemporary oldies. In the whole playlist, there was exactly one song that any of us liked: Neil Young’s Heart of Gold. We all knew which reel it was on, and we waited anxiously for it to come up in rotation – probably once a week – hoping it would be on our shift. We could have cheated, I suppose, but that would have ruined the game.
Brian was working at a KTEL, a country station that required the actual playing of vinyl records. Brian hated country music. So he’d bring a little portable tape deck on which to play his Dead tapes. He’d leave the country turned down, listening to the Dead, until the record was about to end. He’d stop the tape, do the mix, cue up the next record, then go back to the Dead. This was country top 40, so the longest cuts were 4 minutes, tops, so it was a bit disjointed, and took a certain amount of concentration, but it did the trick.
Brian and I were also doing radio journalism on our college station, and one day we went out together to interview the warden at the State Penitentiary. When we were introduced, the warden repeated Brian’s name back to him. “Muir? Are you any relation to John Muir?” The warden was an old mountaineer, and revered John Muir. Brian said yes, and explained a somewhat byzantine family connection, the details of which I have long forgotten.
There ensued a long and enthusiastic conversation between the two of them about John Muir.
Later, as we were walking through the parking lot, I said to Brian, “I didn’t know you were related to John Muir.”
“I’m not,” he said.
With three large projects going simultaneously in addition to the day job, I’ve been a bit oversubscribed lately, so I’ve been getting a lot of my bike time indoors on a trainer. It allows me to multi-task, getting some reading done while I exercise. And I do enjoy it. But it’s not riding. Riding is fun.
I’ve got a couple of days off work, and today I was watching the weather (big storm coming in) and just assuming it’d be indoor bike time for me. But when my friends at the National Weather Service issued their latest short term forecast just before noon, suggesting the snow wouldn’t hit until 3 or 4, I saw the opening, threw on the winter gear and slipped out into the cold grey of an impending snowstorm.
If you look closely at the picture, you can see my reflection in the car bumper, to the right of my ACA sticker. That’s my neon green winter wind vest. It was a bit on the cold side (37F, 3C), a little windy, and fun.
