September 10th, 2010 · Comments Off on Does HOA stand for Hatred of America?
The United States faces many challenges in setting a path forward to a prosperous and sustainable future. Among the most intractable are semi-hidden rule sets that inhibit people and institutions from making the Energy Smart choice. To be able to move forward to a lower-polluting, healthier, sustainable, and more prosperous path, those Energy Smart choices must become the preferred and easy choices to make.
Sadly, throughout American society, there are explicit, oblique, and simply obscure obstacles that inhibit Americans from making Energy Smart choices. They include how we misrepresent the costs of energy usage, with the damages and costs from “externalities” like coal-fired electricity plant mercury emissions, gasoline/diesel fuel health impacts, and fossil-foolish carbon-dioxide emissions (climate change) not being including in the direct price of the energy bill, even though these are quite real costs. There are also significant regulatory challenges, such as those that inhibit factories from pursuing combined-heat power (CHP) to generate electricity because the rules inhibit their selling the electricity for a fair price. And, of course, many of these barriers are cultural, such as Americans wanting a two-year (45+%) or so payback on energy efficiency investments when they would be happy with a fraction of that investing in the stock market.
Amid the cultural and regulatory challenges, one of the significant — and too little discussed — barriers to Energy Smart choices comes from HOAs: Home Owners Associations. While the name seems so empowering, with that association of home owners implying a community gathering for grass-roots organizing for better communities, the truth is not nearly so benign. HOAs, which cover a surprisingly large share of America’s home owners, are mainly a creation of home builders seeking to structure the largest profits on home sales rather than from the bottom-up association of home owners.
HOAs, all too often, work from rigid, builder imposed rule sets to enforce norms that inhibit Americans from making Energy Smart choices.
Prohibitions against installing solar systems. Evidently, producing low-carbon electricity is worse than putting mercury and carbon into the atmosphere when flipping the light switch.
Requirements to waste energy. Evidently, wasting energy is a sign of a better life. Perhaps my favorite (least favorite) case was the HOA that required its residents to maintain gas-fired exterior lights burning 24/7 and whose board refused to allow an owner to put in energy efficient lighting instead.
Simply put, around the nation, 10s of millions of Americans live under HOA rules, rules that constrain them from taking simple, straightforward, Energy Smart steps to improve their lives and improve others’ lives by reducing the pollution footprint of their homes. Want to take the Energy Smart step of putting up a white roof in a hot area? Forget that cool roof — unless you spend $10,000 more for the one the HOA board prefers. Want to put in a water barrel, forget it because it is an unsightly statue. This has led to legal action, such as laws forbidding HOAs from stopping solar projects. And, there is plenty of advice out there for HOA members and directors as to how to green your HOA. Even so, the progress is incremental and the ways in which HOAs constrain Americans’ rights and ability to make Energy Smart choices are almost innumerable.
Considering the power of and imperative of making Energy Smart choices to reduce our pollution and foster a more sustainable energy system, how Home Owners’ Associations stand in the way of Energy Smart practices drives a simple question:
Does HOA stand for Hatred Of America?
That is a serious question meriting serious examination which will occur in future posts.
R L Miller comes to the table with thoughtful, informed, insightful, and passionate writing. This guest post is the second (here is the first) of RL Miller’s highlighting the anti-science syndrome suffering hatred of a livable economic system that is prevalent in the new wave of Republican candidates for Congress. An utter disdain for science, openly using truthiness-laden talking points that are simply false. To paraphrase a famous question, “Have you no shame, political candidate, no shame at all?”
They mindlessly deny the science of climate change.
Their stupid is contagious.
And if they win, humanity loses.
I’m tracking Climate Zombies: every Republican candidate for House, Senate, and Governor who claims that global warming is a hoax, doubts the science of climate change, and wants a new Dark Ages for America.
When it comes to the November 2010 elections, few people identify science as the core issue. Economic concerns (JOBS! JOBS! JOBS!), fossil-foolish fueled anger at government, passions over the role of government, and otherwise are among the many reasons why the current vogue is to predict a Republican wave come November. A hidden element of the election, for most Americans, is that this election is fundamentally about science.
The anti-science strain pervading the right wing in the United States is the last thing the country needs in a time of economic challenge.
This searing editorial begins with a quotation from Rush Limbaugh:
The four corners of deceit: government, academia, science and media. Those institutions are now corrupt and exist by virtue of deceit. That’s how they promulgate themselves; it is how they prosper.
While, as Nature’s editors state, “it is tempting to to laugh this off,” the reality is that Rush’s bombast is the position taken by too many of 2010’s Republican Party candidates. Expertise and knowledge and institutions that value these are the enemy.
Sadly, Rush and ilk are making understanding and support of science an ideological litmus test.
While climate denial is central to that litmus test, it is far from the only element.
Denialism over global warming has become a scientific cause célèbre within the movement. Limbaugh, for instance, who has told his listeners that “science has become a home for displaced socialists and communists”, has called climate-change science “the biggest scam in the history of the world”. The Tea Party’s leanings encompass religious opposition to Darwinian evolution and to stem-cell and embryo research — which Beck has equated with eugenics. The movement is also averse to science-based regulation, which it sees as an excuse for intrusive government. Under the administration of George W. Bush, science in policy had already taken knocks from both neglect and ideology. Yet President Barack Obama’s promise to “restore science to its rightful place” seems to have linked science to liberal politics, making it even more of a target of the right.
It is hard to understate the damage that anti-science syndrome suffering ideologues could create. The achievements of science are core to our existence, from medicine that saves our lives to analytical tools that enable speed-of-light communications to … Demonization of science fosters, in the near and long-term, a weakened economic competitiveness for the United States. And, it will lead to a much weaker nation in the decades to come due to climate chaos in addition to a weakening of America’s position in the sciences.
Few Americans put ‘respect for science’ and basic scientific knowledge at the top of the list when they go into the poll booth. Considering the stark contrast between the parties and the serious negative consequences of having a governing elite ignorant of and disdainful for science, perhaps it should make it higher up the list.
Consider what the Limbaugh/Morano crowd is saying about climate: not only that that the world’s scientists and scientific institutions are systematically wrong, but that they are purposefully perpetrating a deception. Virtually all the world’s governments, scientific academies, and media are either in on it or duped by it. The only ones who have pierced the veil and seen the truth are American movement conservatives, the ones who found death panels in the healthcare bill.
It’s a species of theater, repeated so often people have become inured, but if you take it seriously it’s an extraordinary charge. For one thing, if it’s true that the world’s scientists are capable of deception and collusion on this scale, a lot more than climate change is in doubt. These same institutions have told us what we know about health and disease, species and ecosystems, energy and biochemistry. If they are corrupt, we have to consider whether any of the knowledge they’ve generated is trustworthy. We could be operating our medical facilities, economies, and technologies on faulty theories. We might not know anything! Here we are hip-deep in postmodernism and it came from the right, not the left academics they hate.
Scientific claims are now subject to ideological disputation. Rush Limbaugh is telling millions of people that they’ve taken the red pill and everything they once knew and could trust is a lie. They’ve woken up outside the Matrix and he is their corpulent, drug-addicted, thrice-divorced Morpheus. What could go wrong?
Amid their enthusiastic embrace of western consumer technologies, increasingly affluent Chinese are leaving one appliance behind: clothes dryers. According to Washington Post front-page reporting,
For reasons practical as well as cultural, most Chinese consumers simply don’t like clothes dryers. Don’t want them. Don’t trust them. Won’t buy them. And even when they have them around, won’t use them.
Business interests complain, in the article, that the dryer market isn’t “fully developed”. A PRC domestic brand “stopped producing dryers since last year because they don’t sell.” The only people in China interested in dryers seem to be foreigners and Chinese who have lived overseas.
This is, evidently, something bad.
Shanghai authorities consider all that hanging laundry so unsightly that in April, before the start of the ongoing Shanghai World Expo, they issued an edict banning the practice of hanging clothes out to dry, along with other practices deemed “uncivilized,” such as spitting, jaywalking and wearing pajamas in public.
Evidently, moving beyond the costs (both the dryer and the electricity), the key reason for Chinese aversion to dryers is a cultural belief that sun-dried clothing is healthier. The Post reporter, Keith Richburg, seems to find this an archaic notion.
But the real reason may lie deeper, having more to do with years of tradition and an unshakable belief in nature’s superiority to modern technology. Sunlight, most Chinese will tell you, leaves clothes cleaner and healthier to wear, and is better for the fabric, than a machine.
Richburg doesn’t, however, take any words to explore whether that “unshakable belief” has a basis in reality. A quick exploration might have educated Richburg that the Chinese might well be right as to “nature’s superiority to modern technology.” “Ever single … fabric can be machines washed cold and line dried …. This approach is the most gentle for the fabric and the most energy efficient …”
Now, when it comes to “healthier”, Richburg leaves several items. For example, in terms of “exercise”, which does our bodies more good: dumping things in the dryer or putting them out on a line to dry. More importantly, Richburg doesn’t have any mention of the most significant “health” implication: the elimination of the energy usage from a dryer. Drying a load might require in the range of 2-3+ kilowatt hours of electricity. In the PRC, with a coal-dominant electricity system, roughly 1.6 lbs of CO2 is emitted per kWh. Without even considering the “embedded cost” of the dryer, itself, the average Chinese is avoiding about 5 lbs of carbon dioxide emissions (along with avoided mercury and other pollutant emissions) by maintaining the healthier choice of line drying clothing. Multiply this by, potentially, 100 million loads per day for the 1.3+ billion Chinese, and we’re talking some serious avoided emissions.
Reading Richburg’s article, Chinese preference for line-drying seems an archaic, anti-capitalist vestige to belittle rather than embrace. In fact, the Chinese choice is healthier for their pocketbooks (no dryer to buy, less ironing to do, longer lasting clothing, avoided electricity costs), for their bodies (burning calories putting clothing out to dry), and for the planet (avoided mercury, sulphur, and Co2 emissions).
A related item: The Washington Post, yesterday, had a piece that could be described as “those poor horse whip manufacturers, we need to build more buggies”, with a focus on how moving to CFLs is putting an incandescent plant out of work. The reality of such disruptions is important and the specific plant highlights the importance of an industrial policy that helps move workers caught in a transition to new employment (with, perhaps, assistance for putting in new manufacturing), but the article had essential zero discussion of the serious benefits that more efficient lighting brings to individuals, businesses, and the nation. For a discussion, see Climate Progress:The Washington Post gets it wrong again.
September 7th, 2010 · Comments Off on Are we “renewing” a misguided “commitment”?
Yesterday, President Barack Obama announced a $50 billion investment in the nation’s transportation infrastructure with an infrastructure investment bank to come to support future investments. There is much of value to this program, from the very simple reality that there is a huge back-log of investment requirements to repair the nation’s infrastructure (let alone bring it to the 21st century) to the nearer term value of providing employment to people across the country. Our roads are in lousy condition with too large a number of dangerous bridges. Our airports can be better. Our rail system is a shadow of what it could and should be. In other words, at least on first glance, needed investment with shorter and longer term benefits.
ROADS: Rebuild 150,000 miles of roads – renewing our commitment to the backbone of our transportation system;
Take a look at this. The first item is focused on our road network with a dedication to “renewing our commitment to the backbone of our transportation system.”
Sadly, it is basically true that roads are the current backbone of America’s transportation system. It is a scoliotic backbone, one that has twisted and distorted the national system toward an economy overly reliant on (expensive) imported oil and far too polluting for the achieved results. Should we be “renewing our commitment” to our addiction to fossil fuels or should be repairing our roads as part of an investment path to create a sustainable 21st century transportation system?
Thinking broader …
Now, President Obama (and the Obama Administration) understands the need for investments that create something better than today’s system. The press release specifically speaks to the need for investing in improving the rail network. There is discussion of the need to bring together management of Federal investment in surface transportation — hopefully to reduce the incentive structures that end up fostering highway investment in unSmart Growth ways. There looks to be much of value in this proposal — value in helping Americans get back to work and value in helping build a better transportation infrastructure. Even so, should we really be “renewing our commitment” to a transportation sector (the road network) that has helped foster so many of the nation’s problems from hemorrhaging dollars overseas to pay for oil to the health costs of gasoline/diesel pollution to the 10,000s of dead & wounded on the highways each year to our oil addiction’s contributions to mounting climate chaos? Or, should we be “renewing our commitment” to build a transportation system to support a prosperous, climate-friendly America for the 21st century and beyond?
September 7th, 2010 · Comments Off on Trains to Sustain Our Suburbs?
Another guest post from the extremely thoughtful and insightful BruceMcF. Bruce’s thoughts, writ large, about transport policy and, more specifically, electrified rail merit attention and action.
Burning the Midnight Oil for Living Energy Independence
As Dean Baker reported on the (bookmark worthy) Real World Economics Review Blog, new home sales figures for July are out, and they are exactly as would have been expected when the Mortgage Brokers Association reported a slump in mortgage applications in May.
The stronger figures earlier in this year, in other words, included more than a normal rebound from a recession:
People who might have bought in the second half of 2010 or even 2011 instead bought their home before the tax credit expired. Now that the credit has expired, there is less demand than ever, leaving the market open for another plunge in prices. The support the tax credit gave to the housing market was only temporary
This does not mean that all policy response is futile: what it does mean is that the policy response must address the problem we are experiencing, not the problem we wish we were experiencing.
September 6th, 2010 · Comments Off on Republican Senate Candidates supports hastening Anthropocene Era
This guest post from Lefty Coaster provides windows on the anti-science syndrome suffering hatred of a livable economic system running through the rhetoric of many of the Republican Party’s candidates.
Republicans would despoil our country in pursuit of the oil and coal that are so profitable for their corporate sponsors, and so bad for our planetary climate. They are pushing energy policies that are hastening the end of the Holocene epoch, and the start of the Anthropocene epoch.
If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement, the one thing we haven’t had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.
We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together.
Now, I have always written letters and even had many published — just not one every day. WarrenS inspires me to do better.
Many newspapers state that they will reject letters that have been published elsewhere, thus I have not been blogging letters … perhaps that should change. Thus, below is part of an “unpublished letters” series publishing, with some delay, those LTEs that don’t get picked up by the editors.
28 June 2010
To the editor, The Washington Post,
This is the second time this year that NASA climatologist James Hansen has been awarded a major international prize for his work in environmental science. Dr. Hansen has just received the Blue Planet Prize, considered to be Japan’s version of the Nobel Prize. Earlier this year he was given the Sophie Prize, perhaps the world’s most prestigious award in climate science.
Both of these awards, however, seem to have gone utterly unnoticed and unremarked in pages of The Washington Post.
Attacks on climate scientists — malicious attacks repeatedly proven to be based on falsehoods and misrepresentations — have been reported, even receiving front-page coverage.
Here is a case where one of those targets for attack has received, repeatedly, significant recognition for his work. And, The Post has met that with silence.
Americans are confused about the state of climate science and scientists views on our changing world. Reporting that emphasizes conflict, that highlights attacks and controversy, and does not report on how the scientific community stands with Jim Hansen — and not Jim Inhofe — is one of the principle reasons for that confusion.
Jim Hansen’s work more than merited these awards. Washington Post readers deserve to hear about them.
R L Miller comes to the table with thoughtful, informed, insightful, and passionate writing. This guest post highlights the anti-science syndrome suffering hatred of a livable economic system that is prevalent in the new wave of Republican candidates for Congress. An utter disdain for science, openly using truthiness-laden talking points that are simply false. To paraphrase a famous question, “Have you no shame, political candidate, no shame at all?”
After researching the causes of temperature fluctuations on earth, I found the largest factor to be the sun. The earth’s orbit changes. Also the earth’s spin and axis change over time. When areas of the earth are closer to the sun, the temperature is hotter and when they are further away, cooler. The sun also has more activity at times and less at other times. They have been able to map out large changes in the earth’s temperature over time to the sun. Times with no polar ice caps have corresponded to times when we were closer to the sun. Ice ages have corresponded to times when we were further from the sun. We should not punish the people of the United States financially by legislating on pseudo-science that has not been proven.
Now, I have always written letters and even had many published — just not one every day. WarrenS inspires me to do better.
Many newspapers state that they will reject letters that have been published elsewhere, thus I have not been blogging letters … perhaps that should change. Thus, below is part of an “unpublished letters” series publishing, with some delay, those LTEs that don’t get picked up by the editors.
15 April 2010
To The Editor, The Washington Post
The effects of global warming are not abstract. We’re feeling them in our noses. According to a just released National Wildlife Federation study, increased CO2 levels and longer growing seasons (did you know spring arrives 10-14 days earlier than just 20 years ago) increase pollen production. And, as global warming worsens, the pollen production will skyrocket. A doubling or tripling of ragweed allergens in the United States is going to have huge economic impacts. We already lose around $12 billion dollars a year to hay fever suffering; we lose over 14 million school and work days, over $15 billion in medical costs and over $5 billion in lost earnings a year to asthma. What will the Global Warming multiplier be?
But wait! There’s more! Fungal production will probably quadruple with doubled CO2 levels; tree pollen levels are expected to increase drastically — and did I mention that poison ivy will be faster-growing and more virulent?
But it’s not all bad news. Investing in pharmaceutical companies should be a winning strategy. As asthma and allergy debilitates huge segments of the population, we can sneeze all the way to the bank.
A. Siegel
NOTE: Not an employee or otherwise affiliated with NWF.
The United States faces many challenges in setting a path forward to a prosperous and sustainable future. Among the most intractable are semi-hidden rule sets that inhibit people and institutions from making the Energy Smart choice. To be able to move forward to a lower-polluting, healthier, sustainable, and more prosperous path, those Energy Smart choices must become the preferred and easy choices to make.
the science of climate change.
technologies, increasingly affluent Chinese are leaving one appliance behind: clothes dryers. According to 
As