Here is my entry for this year’s Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day exhibition:

Trillium sessile, pinhole photograph using a Panasonic DMC-G3

Today is a good example of the no-snow belt that is centered on Fort Wayne. The snowless band is easy to see in this morning’s NOHRSC snow map:

There is almost enough snow up at Love Creek to make it worth driving to Berrien County to ski tomorrow.

Apex Wind Energy’s wind farm project in Wells County will begin in the spring. The wind farm will consist of eighty-seven turbines. It looks like they will be using 1.8 MW turbines, forming a 156.6 MW farm. This means the Wells County wind farm will add 10% to Indiana’s Net Summer Renewable Capacity. With a pessimistic estimate of the capacity factor, this wind farm can be expected to replace at least 0.2% of Indiana’s coal use.

It is common to recognize that disasters that may happen are often worth taking precautions against, just in case they do happen. This is why insurance exists, and is part of the justification for things like flood walls and maintaining a powerful military. It is also the reason why certain safety equipment is mandated. Precautions for dealing with low-probability high-impact events leads to a comparison I think should be much more prominent.¹

You probably won’t be involved in a car crash serious enough that a seat belt and airbag will save your life. But if you are, the injury your seat belt will save you from is worth far more than the extra cost of the safety equipment. In fact, the damage you will be saved from is so severe that it is recognized that the cost of requiring safety equipment in everyone’s car is justified. But even individually, the cost is worth it, as can easily be shown with some cost estimates.

So, what is the cost of seat belts?² A set of no-name replacement seat belts with mechanism (without some of the safety features) costs a bit over $250, a good quality set will be more. Even on eBay a ‘new’ airbag for a common car costs over $100, and you need several. Having higher quality equipment professionally installed will cost more, but I’ll assume you are a cheap but competent shade-tree mechanic. Given these prices, safety equipment accounts for a significant portion of the cost of a car.

What is the risk of not using proper safety equipment in your car? In the United States you have a 1.7% chance of dying in a car crash.³ But more than half of the people killed in passenger vehicle crashes weren’t wearing seat belts. Since 85% of people do wear seat belts, this means your chance of being killed in a car accident if you don’t wear a seat belt is much worse than if you do wear one. Some people still argue against seat belts, but seat belts are clearly worth using.⁴

This is only considering fatal crashes, the chances of being involved in a non-fatal crash are much higher. This just makes the case stronger. If you have a couple people in the car with you when you are in a minor crash, talking to a doctor for a few minutes will cost significantly more than the cost of the safety equipment. But if there is a real injury, the cost of dealing with it—and the possibility that you couldn’t recover from it—is so much higher than the cost of adding the seat belts that there is no doubt that it is worth having seat belts required on all cars.

Now compare this with anthropogenic (man made) climate change. We know it is happening and we know there will be severe consequences for continuing to cause it to happen. But in the United States the issue is often presented as in question. Most people at only familiar with the supposed debate over the existence of anthropogenic climate changes; the positions are typically presented as between those who deny any significance of man-made climate problems and those who recognize the most-likely scenarios of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). But, as I wrote last year, the most-likely scenarios in the AR4 are actually fairly optimistic compared to some of the likely outcomes. This means that many people aren’t familiar with—or discount—the less likely high-impact possibilities. But the possibility of a larger than commonly recognized impact is within the expected range for the likely scenarios and must be taken seriously. This is an example of the common mistake of looking at an average out of context of the range.

Since we are nearly guaranteed to have negative consequences—and also have a significant chance of extremely negative consequences—we must take the low-probability high-impact risks into consideration. This brings us back to the seat belt analogy. We recognize that requiring the current level of safety equipment in cars is worthwhile, maintaining logical consistency suggests that we also take action to remove the possibility of the high-damage climate scenarios. Even those who continue to discount the evidence for anthropogenic climate change and its impacts should consider it prudent to take action to alleviate the risk of the high-impact possibilities.

And this is before even considering the side benefits of the best solutions to man-made climate problems, for example: the best solutions will leave us healthier, create jobs, and fulfil our obligation to stewardship of the earth.

Of course, the analogy breaks down because you may be fortunate enough no never be involved in a car crash, but you are certain to be affected by anthropogenic climate change, and have already been affected by pollution. Now it is simply a matter of lessening the impact. This leads to an expanded version of the analogy.

Imagine you are the passenger in a pickup truck. You aren’t buckled, but there is a three-point seat belt. The passenger side airbag is switched off, but you can easily reach the switch. The brakes and steering have failed. The truck is heading toward a wall at seventy miles per hour, but you have seconds before impact. Do you fasten your seat belt and enable the airbag?

I originally published this blog entry on 2011-12-31, but decided it needed to be reworked.

I picked a few pawpaws this year. In addition to eating a couple plain, I made some ice cream. I also made a small batch of pawpaw bread. I used an easy-to-make banana quick-bread recipe that I often use, but replaced the creamed banana with creamed pawpaw. The result is a cake-like bread:

This basic pawpaw bread is good, but I was disappointed at how little of the pawpaw flavor came through. I’ll try again next year with pawpaws that haven’t been sitting puréed in the fridge for several days, and will also add a few spices.

Pawpaw Bread Recipe

Instructions

• Peal and remove seeds from two or three pawpaws.
• Cream pawpaw meat along with oil, sugar, eggs, and milk.
• Add dry ingredients and mix until just moistened.
• Put batter in two oiled 3 x 5.75 inch pans.
• Bake for 40 minutes at 350°F

Suggested changes to this recipe

• I used table sugar instead of honey because I was out of honey. I prefer to use 1/2 or less cups of honey in my banana, apple, or pumpkin bread. This pawpaw bread tasted like it would be better with honey.
• Add some spices. Banana and apple breads don’t need any spices, but this tasted like it needed something. If I find pawpaws next year, I’ll try again with a 1/8 to 1/4 teaspoons of cinnamon.

There are several nearby pawpaw patches, but it has been a number of years since I have eaten pawpaws. Most years that I remember to look for them, the pawpaws seem to go from way under ripe directly to already eaten by animals. This year I checked more often, and I was able to find a few ripe ones before the critters got them.

Ripe pawpaws are have a strong and distinctive flavor, and a creamy texture. They taste good plain, but they aren’t a fruit that I want to eat several of at once, as I often do with apples and bananas. Because of the mushy, creamy, texture, I decided to make some pawpaw ice cream. My experiment turned out well, especially when paired with homemade chocolate ice cream.

The flavor of the pawpaw is strong enough that it doesn’t take much to make a batch of ice cream. I skinned the fruit and removed the seeds, then ran the meat of the pawpaw through a blender to make it even smoother. This gave me nearly a cup of pawpaw purée. I added milk, cream, and a little vanilla to the pawpaw. After fifteen minutes in a borrowed ice cream maker, I had a batch of excellent pawpaw ice cream. Mmm…

Pawpaw Ice Cream Recipe

Instructions

• Peal and remove seeds from two or three pawpaws.
• Cream pawpaw meat in blender.
• Add other ingredients to blender and mix.
• Put in ice cream maker.

Fort Wayne finally has a law stating that the minimum safe separation between a cyclist and a passing car is at least three feet!

This is a good time to remind everyone what a safe pass looks like:

Notice the steps of the pass:

1. Begin to move over well behind the cyclist.
2. Pass at a safe distance. There is a minimum of three feet between the closest points of the car and the bicyclist. Don’t forget to give room for your mirrors, dual rear wheels, and trailer. On fast roads with large vehicles, the minimum safe distance may be larger.
3. Move back into the lane well after the cyclist.

Now that the new change to the city code has been passed, the implicit minimum safe distance is now the legal minimum. The city council also made it legal for adult cyclists to use sidewalks.

Now, to pass a similar law state wide.

See also, Fort Wayne Bike Commuters: 3 foot law passed! and my safe driving around bicycles page

How much electricity is used in the United States for lighting homes while people sleep? As I walk or drive around at night, I see many lights left on at all hours. Given the number of lights I see, I suspect they make a fairly significant contribution to residential electricity usage.

So how much energy is used by these lights?

Well, this is easy to calculate.

A 40 watt light bulb.

I must start with an estimate of the power used by these lights. I’ll assume the average household uses 40 watts worth of extra lighting while they are asleep. This is low for some houses in my neighborhood, but also allows for those of us who don’t leave any lights on. Choosing 40 watts also allows for not counting night lights for people who have a good reason to use them.

Now, there are 116,700,000 households in the USA, so at 40 watts per household, night lighting accounts for 4,668,000,000 watts of electricity that is used all night, every night. If we assume 8 hour nights, this lighting is just under 1% residential household electricity consumption. This is a lot of electricity. It is so much that it can be expressed as the number of power plants that are dedicated to providing electricity for night lights in homes.

For the conversion to the number of power plants, I’ll only consider coal power plants, which currently provide over 42% of the electricity generated in the United States, and are largely used to power the base load. There are 1,396 coal power plants operating in the United States, with a combined summer net generating capacity of 316,800,000,000 watts. This means each plant can continuously produce an average of nearly 227,000,000 watts. This means that more than 20 coal power plants are operating all night just to produce light that no one even sees.

Since no one actually uses this light, these extra twenty coal power plants aren’t actually needed. So we have twenty coal power plants that can simply be turned off without any loss to the benefits derived from using electricity they generate.

Not only can every one who is using these extra lights immediately save 1% off their power bill, turning off these unnecessary lights will have immediate quality of life benefits. By not mining and burning the over 7,000,000 tons of coal per year that is used to power these lights, our health and environment will be better than if we continue this unnecessary resource depletion.

It is important to note that the power for these night lights is part of the overnight base load on the power system. The overnight base load is one of the major hurdles in our inevitable move to a solar dominated—and completely renewable—energy system. An analogous contribution to our overnight base load is made by the many lights left on overnight in businesses, schools, and other non-residential buildings.

So, one of the easiest things we can do to improve the use of energy in the United States is to simply turn off night lights that aren’t really being used. If you don’t think there are any lights you can eliminate, consider switching to more efficient bulbs.

See my references and calculations.

Remember the good old days when the USA could launch a man into space? One year ago today our last spaceship landed.

A recent trip took me to Hanover, Pennsylvania, home of Snyder’s of Hanover and several other pretzel companies. It was good to see that Snyder’s of Hanover has installed a 3.5 MW solar farm across the road from their factory:

The solar farm is operated for Snyder’s-Lance by RMK Solar, and is expected to save 30% of the Hanover location’s energy costs at 2010 rates. It is always good to see another example of sustainable energy not only as a good moral choice, but as a good financial choice.

Last week I wrote that Open Access is important because it allows anyone to easily check that news articles match the science paper they claim to be reporting on. Today I was asked to comment on an article that turns out to be an excellent case study.

The paper in question was published today in Nature Climate Change. The paper, “The polarizing impact of science literacy and numeracy on perceived climate change risks” by Kahan & alii, happens to be available on the Nature website, so anyone can read it. It is a clear and accessible paper, so you can evaluate it yourself.

Kahan & alii created a survey to determine if public’s lack of concern about the risks caused by climate change is due to a general failure to understand science or to something else. This is an interesting idea to explore. Misunderstandings of science are often attributed to not having sufficient knowledge and mental skills to properly understand the information available. Kahan & alii call this the science comprehension thesis (SCT). To test the SCT, Kahan & alii devised a survey that covered basic political leaning, basic science knowledge, and some analytical reasoning, in addition to the participant’s evaluation of the seriousness of climate change risk and nuclear power risk.

Instead of a positive correlation of numeracy and science literacy with high estimates of climate change risk, the study found slight negative correlations. That is, those with slightly better scores on the reasoning and science literacy questions gave slightly lower ratings on a 0—10 scale for the question, “How much risk do you believe climate change poses to human health, safety or prosperity?”

The survey results were sufficient to also test the cultural cognition thesis (CCT). This thesis states that the views of others in groups a person associates with have a large impact on a person’s reasoning and analysis of risks to society. The results of the study show that CCT is a better explanation of the perceptions of climate risk in the American general public than is SCT. So among those on the egalitarian communitarian end of the scale, increased knowledge and reasoning abilities is correlated with an increased evaluation of the climate change risk; while for those on the hierarchical individualist end of the scale the correlation is the opposite:

This supports the idea that knowledge and reasoning ability aren’t necessarily enough to make a person believe something counter to what a group they are in tends to believe:

For ordinary citizens, the reward for acquiring greater scientific knowledge and more reliable technical-reasoning capacities is a greater facility to discover and use—or explain away—evidence relating to their groups’ positions.

Basically, for many people peer pressure is more important than scientific evidence.

It is important to note that this study only covers the general public: this isn’t an evaluation of experts in the relevant fields. Across the political spectrum, the experts are nearly unanimous in evaluating the human impact on climate to be a serious to dire risk. This may be in the citations, but there is also the possibility that people higher on the knowledge/numeracy scale will in general provide lower estimates of risk, partially because they are better at thinking of the range of values than others are.

Phew! That’s a longer summary than I intended to write. Oh, well, on to the reporting in question.

The news article I was asked to evaluate was posted in The Register, a British Information Technology tabloid. Given the contents of the Kahan paper, one would expect a headline like, “Yale study concludes public apathy over climate change unrelated to science literacy.” But The Register mangled the story into something completely different, titling Lewis Page’s article: “The more science you know, the less worried you are about climate.” This is clearly an inaccurate representation of both what was studied and the conclusion of the study. Now, it is often the case that the headline is written by a different person than wrote the story, so the two don’t necessarily match. Unfortunately, in this case the story just continues the misunderstanding.

In addition to misrepresenting the study in his own writing, Page misrepresents the study using creative ellipses in his quotes from the article. For example, the third paragraph from the end of the journal article reads (with Page’s version highlighted):

Even if cultural cognition serves the personal interests of individuals, this form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making. What guides individual risk perception, on this account, is not the truth of those beliefs but rather their congruence with individuals’ cultural commitments. As a result, if beliefs about a societal risk such as climate change come to bear meanings congenial to some cultural outlooks but hostile to others, individuals motivated to adopt culturally congruent risk perceptions will fail to converge, or at least fail to converge as rapidly as they should, on scientific information essential to their common interests in health and prosperity. Although it is effectively costless for any individual to form a perception of climate-change risk that is wrong but culturally congenial, it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.

But Page’s story in The Register merely quotes it as:

This form of reasoning can have a highly negative impact on collective decision making … it is very harmful to collective welfare for individuals in aggregate to form beliefs this way.

That’s quite a difference in meaning, especially when Page prefaces it with his own statement:

Given that the profs had assumed from the start that scepticism is wrong, this forced them to the conclusion that simply teaching people more science and giving them more facts and numbers is not a good idea as it will lead them into bad (sceptical) decisions.

This one sentence manages to misrepresent both the background and conclusion of the Kahan paper. But reading the quotes in Page’s article wouldn’t give any indication that this summary doesn’t represent Kahan’s work. Page goes on to claim that Kahan & alii endorse “a communication strategy on climate change which is not focused on sound scientific information.” But if you read Kahan’s paper, you can see that they endorse communicating sound science, but in a way that also takes into account the views of various groups:

As citizens understandably tend to conform their beliefs about societal risk to beliefs that predominate among their peers, communicators should endeavor to create a deliberative climate in which accepting the best available science does not threaten any group’s values.

By now you should be unsurprised that this sentence forms the bulk of one of Page’s magical ellipses.

In addition to misrepresenting the Kahan & alii paper, Page repeats the “too expensive to fix” climate canard. This myth has been debunked many times. For example, in their excellent Changing Planet, Changing Health, Paul Epstein and Dan Ferber summarized the evidence that the health consequences of human caused climate change alone are more than enough to justify the conclusion that acting now on climate change is less expensive than inaction.

Page’s article in The Register is a good example of why it is important to check original sources when dramatic results are claimed. Even reading the abstract of the Kahan & alii article is enough to correct the misunderstandings promoted in The Register. Fortunately, Nature Climate Change made the entire article available online, so you can easily see for yourself what Kahan & alii conclude.

One option for cheap, abundant power is concentrated solar:

CSP is an easy, inexpensive, environmentally friendly, and renewable source of energy. It sure beats coal and oil.

I frequently need to read journal articles, both for my research in the lab, my own research, and for general interest. The internet is a great help, allowing me to easily find what I need. In fact, allowing scientists to easily share information is why the World Wide Web was created.

This makes pay-walls more frustrating.

In the course of my reading, I keep running into a serious problem: not all journals are open access. Some, like Nature and Science, are big enough that they can pretty much do whatever they want, because people will still read them. They charge enough for institutional subscriptions that university libraries can’t always pay for the necessary archive access. This forces professors and students to buy their own individual account. Others, such as ingentaconnect try to charge as much as $213 for a single article! That’s more than a grad student subscription to Nature or Science. This is a problem. Especially since most useful research is funded by the public.

It is inexcusable that a simple idea—that no American should be denied access to biomedical research their tax dollars paid to produce—could be scuttled by a greedy publisher who bought access to a member of Congress.

—Michael Eisen

A partial workaround is to use interlibrary loan. This requires filling out request forms and waiting for articles that may not even be relevant. When the articles do come, sometimes after a significant delay, they are often unreadable low resolution scans.

A slightly better solution is the journals that allow the authors to publicly archive their own work. Thanks to Google Scholar, these are usually easy to find when they exist. But the author-posted versions of papers are sometimes late drafts, not the final published version.

The real solution is to require all studies that receive public funding to publish in open access journals. Not having open access to journal articles is a major failure in the purpose of the internet, and specifically the world wide web. Remember, the WWW was created to provide easy access to scholarly information for physicists. All other uses of the web are simply add-ons to this primary purpose.

Because this is why the internet exists, it is completely unreasonable that there are any non-open access physics and computer science journals after, say, 1995. I can see other fields being a little late to adapt, so I’ll give them a grace period—until 2000 or so. This is 2012. It is silly that there are still non-open access journals. I can see a hybrid system working where there is a six-month—maybe even a two-year—embargo on open access. But the current situation is crazy.

In addition to the necessity of open access in research, it is also needed for being informed. Science stories in the news are often inaccurate. What a paper in a scientific journal says is frequently totally different from the story reported. News stories are often based on a press release by the university where the research was conducted. But the press releases are written by someone whose job is promoting the university, and often do not accurately represent what the paper itself says. The inaccurate press release is then rewritten as a news story by someone without a background in science. Because much of science reporting is so poor, I like to at least skim the original journal article referred to in major stories to make sure that it actually says what the story claims. The lack of open access journals severely limits this important fact-checking.

Papers behind a pay-wall may as well not exist.

While the importance of open access is fresh in your mind, sign this petition to the President.

A few days after I posted this, a several headlines provided an excellent case study showing why open access is so important.

Today I learned some good news about wind power in central Indiana. E.ON NA just received permits from Tipton and Madison Counties to begin construction of a 200 MW wind farm in Tipton, Madison, Grant, and Howard Counties. The Wildcat Wind Farm will add nearly 13% to Indiana’s renewable energy generation capability. This represents a potential 1% reduction in Indiana’s coal use.

One of the latest attacks on reasonable energy policy and conservation is a popular YouTube video titled “If I wanted America to fail,” produced by Free Market America. I was going to ignore this one, but one person asked for an evaluation, and another accused me of being a “lib” who can’t offer a “meaningful reply” because I called it agitprop. So I’ll offer a public rebuttal. As always, debunking something like this video requires a stronger background than creating the original video did. This is because truth is usually more complicated than fantasy.

Since the folks behind this video sent out the transcript as a press release, I’ll use it in my debunking. As you’ll see, this propaganda video mostly consists of straw men, zombies, and zombie straw men.

If I wanted America to fail

By Ryan Houck, Free Market America

If I wanted America to fail …

The first thing to notice is that the video is set up to persuade people that their opponents actually want America to fail. If they wanted an honest evaluation of ideas, the would set up the video as an argument that their opponents mistakenly think X will help America succeed.

From here on, I’ll refer to Free Market America as FMA.

To follow, not lead; to suffer, not prosper; to despair, not dream.

I would start with energy.

Actually, this is true. But the considered response is not what FMA is advocating. As we’ll see, this video is propaganda, largely promoting the failure of America. We’ll also see Houck stray from energy policy to conservation.

I’d cut off America’s supply of cheap, abundant energy. I couldn’t take it by force. So, I’d make Americans feel guilty for using the energy that heats their homes, fuels their cars, runs their businesses, and powers their economy.

I’d make cheap energy expensive, so that expensive energy would seem cheap.

So after a couple reasonable introductory sentences, Houck exposes his agenda. It isn’t “cheap, abundant energy” but an expansion of oil and coal.

Our most abundant source of energy is solar. Averaged over the entire day, we receive around 250W / m² of power from the sun. This is so much power that we could provide all power used by the United States by simply covering 7% of structures in the country with solar panels, even if we only use old photovoltaic technology. While coal and oil are finite resources, solar power will be available as long as the sun still shines.

Whether or not one feels guilty for using energy is beside the point. Given the currently available and future supplies of the various energy sources, the current level of technology, the impacts of various energy sources, and economics; the case for conservation of energy (particularly fossil fuels) is clear. As prominent energy executive S David Freeman wrote, “The cheapest, cleanest, and most reliable source of energy is the energy we avoid using.” Freeman knows this from experience: he has a record of saving failing energy companies by using conservation, supplemented with increased generation as necessary. Conservation works, partially because improving energy efficiency is often less expensive than adding additional power. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t also entirely reasonable to feel guilty about sacrificing the nation’s future for instant gratification.

I would empower unelected bureaucrats to all-but-outlaw America’s most abundant sources of energy. And after banning its use in America, I’d make it illegal for American companies to ship it overseas.

I don’t know of anyone who is trying to “all-but-outlaw” America’s abundant energy sources, even if you mistakenly believe that coal and oil are our abundant energy sources. The most I know of that any politician has succeeded in doing is to make an effort speed up adding other energy sources to fossil fuels.

To verify my evaluation of this video as propaganda, it is important to note the term “unelected bureaucrats.” This term is being used to imply that the government is creating an unaccountable system for the purpose of depriving us of energy. In fact, the unelected bureaucrats were hired by the people because they are necessary to enforce the laws passed by the accountable elected officials. Without the hired bureaucrats, the actions of elected officials are meaningless.

If I wanted America to fail …

I’d use our schools to teach one generation of Americans that our factories and our cars will cause a new Ice Age, and I’d muster a straight face so I could teach the next generation that they’re causing Global Warming.

Ah, an excellent example of how this video is agitprop. If the video was meant for education, or merely propaganda in the positive sense, it wouldn’t have included this statement. This is because this is a well known straw man. The predictions of a coming ice age were largely in the popular media, not the scientific journals. But this video implies that the coming ice age was the general view to the extent that it was what was typically taught. But the statement that the prediction in the 1970s was global cooling has been refuted many many times. A more accurate representation of the state of knowledge in the ’70s would be that more research was needed, but the evidence for anthropogenic global warming was mounting. It is amazing that anyone still repeats this oft-debunked misrepresentation of history with a straight face.

The use of a commonly debunked straw man is bad enough, but the indoctrination implied in the statement, “I’d use our schools,” justifies my classification of this video as propaganda.

And when it’s cold out, I’d call it Climate Change instead.

This is another surprisingly popular canard. But as anyone who bothers to check knows, the terms “global warming” and “climate change” have both been used for decades. So even if the choice of which term is used in each instance was correlated with the weather at the moment, the “call it Climate Change” statement would be false. This is because scientists have long used both terms for related-but-distinguishable phenomena; so long, in fact, that the early uses of the terms predate the politicization of climate.

I’d imply that America’s cities and factories could run on wind power and wishes.

This is a particularly perilous bit of sophistry, so I expect to run into this phrase again. This is simply using a clever turn of phrase to imply that sustainable energy is not viable, ignoring the fact that we will inevitably shift to solar being the dominant energy source, with renewable indirect solar sources—such as wind—providing all our remaining supply. This is because petroleum, coal, and natural gas are limited resources that are being rapidly depleted. The eventual shift is not in question, the doubts are only about the timing. As Carl Sagan is reported to have said, “any intelligent civilisation on any planet will eventually have to use the energy of its parent star, exclusively.”

I’d teach children how to ignore the hypocrisy of condemning logging, mining and farming — while having roofs over their heads, heat in their homes and food on their tables. I would never teach children that the free market is the only force in human history to uplift the poor, establish the middle class and create lasting prosperity.

While there is a very small group that argues against any human activity, this isn’t significant in the context of this video. The purpose of the video is clearly to further develop an emotional affinity among prospective voters, who will then be more likely to choose candidates that support free enterprise. This means that we must consider the positions of the candidates, not of small fringe groups. But the video is implying that the views available are their own or their negation. This is an inaccurate representation. Those who hold the negation of FMA’s views are such a small group that they do not have any significant influence in America. The variety of opinions represented by the actual candidates ranges from those who believe in completely wanton exploitation of all resources to those who believe that there are some limits on the exploitation of resources. This is an example of the division between free enterprise and free market. This video is produced by a group that explicitly exists to advocate free enterprise capitalism over free market capitalism. One common tactic among the free enterprise crowd is to redefine free market as a synonym of free enterprise. The failure to distinguish between these terms is what allows Houck to make these claims while using the term “free market.” But even Adam Smith recognized that a free market is not a completely unregulated market.

Instead, I’d demonize prosperity itself, so that they will not miss what they will never have.

I don’t know of anyone in America than is demonizing prosperity itself. There are certainly critiques of particular routes to prosperity, but not “prosperity itself.”

If I wanted America to fail …

I would create countless new regulations and seldom cancel old ones. They would be so complicated that only bureaucrats, lawyers and lobbyists could understand them. That way small businesses with big ideas wouldn’t stand a chance – and I would never have to worry about another Thomas Edison, Henry Ford or Steve Jobs.

This is, of course, a misrepresentation of the situation in the US. It is worth noting that the lawyers and lobbyists typically work for large corporations, and often ensure that regulations are to help themselves and hinder their competitors. This is far from the “regulations are killing us” picture presented by FMA.

I would ridicule as “Flat Earthers” those who urge us to lower energy costs by increasing supply. And when the evangelists of commonsense try to remind people about the law of supply and demand, I’d enlist a sympathetic media to drown them out.

Actually, the comparison with Flat Earthers a good one. At first glance, both the idea of a Flat Earth and the idea of increasing the rate of oil and coal extraction sound reasonable. This is why these ideas have stuck around for so long. But once one examines the evidence, both are revealed to be ridiculous ideas. If one looks at how long it takes to increase the extraction and processing rate of fossil fuels—which only hastens their exhaustion—and compares it to how long it takes to ramp up solar and wind, the clear winner is renewable energy. The argument that the fossil fuel advocates are the ones who want to increase energy supply is revealed to be a ridiculous misunderstanding of supply and demand. The way to increase supply is through increased solar and wind. Effective supply can also be increased through efficiency. But free enterprise folks usually don’t consider increasing renewable energy supply to be increasing supply.

I’ll leave the debunking of the “sympathetic media” charge to others, but note that the most popular news sources are Fox News and The Wall Street Journal.

If I wanted America to fail …

I would empower unaccountable bureaucracies seated in a distant capitol to bully Americans out of their dreams and their property rights. I’d send federal agents to raid guitar factories for using the wrong kind of wood; I’d force homeowners to tear down the homes they built on their own land.

An odd example, since this is referring to the enforcement of a law that was passed under President William McKinley, and most recently updated under President George W Bush. They have had 112 years to oppose this necessary and—one assumes—popular law. Unsurprisingly, some businessmen affected by this law support it, Chris Martin is reported to have said, “I think it’s a wonderful thing. I think illegal logging is appalling. It should stop. And if this is what it takes unfortunately to stop unscrupulous operators, I’m all for it.”

I’d make it almost impossible for farmers to farm, miners to mine, loggers to log, and builders to build.

Once again, this isn’t being done. There are some restrictions on some methods and locations, but in general the various federal departments exist to promote these activities.

And because I don’t believe in free markets, I’d invent false ones. I’d devise fictitious products — like carbon credits — and trade them in imaginary markets. I’d convince people that this would create jobs and be good for the economy.

It is important to remember that both sides believe in the Invisible Hand of the free market, the difference is in what they believe constitutes a free market. Once this distinction is recognized, it becomes clear that there is no attempt to invent false markets. The point of proposed carbon dioxide emissions trading is that the true cost is not currently reflected in the price of fossil fuels. Because having a free market requires that the full cost is reflected in the price, we do not have a free market. “Cap and Trade” is far from perfect, but it is certainly not an “imaginary market”; it is a convenient way of coming closer to a free market as opposed to an unrestrained market. A more accurate understanding of Cap and Trade is to recognize it as eliminating an implicit subsidy in order to create a free market.

It has already been proven that a Cap and Trade system can be an effective free market solution for reducing pollution: sulfur dioxide trading for large power plants was created under President G H W Bush. It proved to be a good way to remove a market distortion. This success was achieved after years of predictions of disaster by the advocates of free enterprise. In fact, the program was so successful that few people even realize it existed.

If I wanted America to fail …

For every concern, I’d invent a crisis; and for every crisis, I’d invent the cause; Like shutting down entire industries and killing tens of thousands of jobs in the name of saving spotted owls. And when everyone learned the stunning irony that the owls were victims of their larger cousins — and not people — it would already be decades too late.

This is another spurious accusation, revealing that energy isn’t FMA’s concern. This wasn’t an invented crisis to shut down an industry; it was a moderate response in order to mitigate a problem that was shown by objective research. Far from “shutting down entire industries,” what happened was simply conserving some public property, while allowing the logging industry to continue on other public and private land. Remember, while trees can be a renewable resource, for all practical purposes old-growth forests are not. This is because they take many human lifetimes to recover. And, as can be seen by walking in nearly any bit of woods in Indiana, what grows back isn’t necessarily the native plants; recovery takes many years, if it happens at all.

The moderate conservation that been achieved is easy to justify without flagship species and indicator species, but these ore the ones that stick in the public’s mind. Focusing on flagship species is a useful simplification as long as we remember there is an entire ecosystem in question. Houck mistakenly reports that scientists thought people were directly killing the spotted owls. This is, of course, not the case. The owls population declining to the point of endangerment through habitat loss. This means people were the cause of the decline, even though it wasn’t due to direct killing. The fact that competition with barred owls as well as habitat loss from logging were causing the decline of spotted owls isn’t an ironic mistake by scientists, it is a misunderstanding by Houck. As was reported by Craig Welch in Smithsonian Magazine, “far from saying that the logging restrictions were a mistake, owl biologists largely insist that more forests must be spared, especially since heavy logging continues on state and private land.”

If I wanted America to fail …

I’d make it easier to stop commerce than start it – easier to kill jobs than create them – more fashionable to resent success than to seek it.

Yet another odd but popular straw man.

When industries seek to create jobs, I’d file lawsuits to stop them. And then I’d make taxpayers pay for my lawyers.

If I wanted America to fail …

I would transform the environmental agenda from a document of conservation to an economic suicide pact. I would concede entire industries to our economic rivals by imposing regulations that cost trillions. I would celebrate those who preach environmental austerity in public while indulging a lavish lifestyle in private.

It is interesting that they are calling continued enforcement of conservation laws that have been on the books for decades a “suicide pact.” The past three Republican presidents fought—and often succeeded—in reversing and weakening the conservation laws that were created by earlier Republicans. As for the cost, this is another example of the math difficulties suffered by many proponents of free enterprise. Some regulations directly save money, while many others cost less than not acting.

I’d convince Americans that Europe has it right, and America has it wrong.

If I wanted America to fail …

I would prey on the goodness and decency of ordinary Americans.

I would only need to convince them … that all of this is for the greater good.

If I wanted America to fail, I suppose I wouldn’t change a thing.

We have seen that Free Market America’s video relies entirely on straw men and ideology to create an emotional appeal for one variety of capitalism. Doing this requires a disconnect between ideology and facts. I’ve shown that FMA’s accusations are baseless by using easily obtainable facts. Education and reason are a better reply than emotional appeals, as seen in my many other posts. I do not think that the free enterprise believers are intentionally trying to destroy the country. I do think that some of their policies are inevitably detrimental. The free market can work, but I am no competitiofideist.

Yesterday was Worldwide Pinhole Photography Day, I submitted a picture of some ferns:

My series of reviews of cider making books wouldn’t be complete without covering the book you are most likely to find in your local homebrewing and wine making shop: Cider: making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider by Annie Proulx¹ and Lew Nichols. Last summer I read the 2^nd edition, and this winter I read the 3^rd edition for the review.

Cider begins with a good quick overview of the entire cider making process, then moves on to presses and growing apples. This book is definitely aimed at Canadians (and Americans) with their own apple orchards, not those of us stuck in cities. If you are interested in choosing which varieties of trees to plant in your northern USA or Canadian cider orchard, Cider appears to be an OK resource.

Compared to the other books, the authors are almost paranoid about Acetobacter; but this goes along with a long section on the production of apple cider vinegar. Interestingly, Proulx and Nichols warn against using windfall apples because of the potential presence of Acetobacter, but don’t mind the inclusion of a few worms. This is the opposite of the position taken in the other cider books, who are against worms and recommend the use of fresh and well-washed windfalls. Proulx and Nichols include nearly as much detail about the illegal production of applejack and apple brandy as of cider itself. An interesting note is the recommendation of using white wine yeasts instead of the champagne yeasts.

The third edition of Cider: making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider is an improvement over the second, but Proulx’ and Nichols’ book still falls behind the other cider books. I found the constant switching between metric and English as the primary units to be distracting. There are also mistakes such as stating that the specific gravity of completely dry cider is 1.000. Because the density of ethanol is lower than that of water and the usual amount of residual sugar, dry ciders—including my own—have a finishing gravity below 1.000.

If you own or are planing on starting a cider orchard, Cider: making, using & enjoying sweet & hard cider is a decent book. Otherwise, I’d recommend one of the other books; preferably Andrew Lea’s Craft Cider Making or Simon McKie’s Making Craft Cider. For a quick introduction to cider making, read Andrew Lea’s website.

BibTeX records:

@book{proulx1997,
    Author = {Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols},
    Edition = {2nd},
    Publisher = {Storey Communications},
    Title = {Cider: making, using \& enjoying sweet \& hard cider},
    Year = {1997}
}

@book{proulx2003,
    Author = {Annie Proulx and Lew Nichols},
    Edition = {3nd},
    Publisher = {Storey Publishing},
    Title = {Cider: making, using \& enjoying sweet \& hard cider},
    Year = {2003}
}

On Tuesday, I found a red-headed woodpecker (Melanerpes erythrocephalus) hanging out at Fox Island. I heard it and got a good look at it a couple hours after the first time I saw it, so I got a good ID and know it was around for a while. The park manager told me that has only seen one in the park in the past two or more decades.

[Update 2012-04-28] Dad just saw a red-headed woodpecker at his backyard feeder, several miles away from Fox Island. He has never seen one there before.

It is amazing how perceptions of distance can differ between modes of transportation. One of the reasons I mostly stopped mountain biking years ago was the unfavorable comparison of total time dedicated to a ride and the actual ride time spent riding. The closest off road spot is a frustrating 25 minute or so drive away, but on a road bike I can be out in the country and away from traffic in just a few minutes. The lost hour and wasted gas are good reasons to just go on a road ride instead. The local mountain bike ride isn’t too far away, but the quickest way to drive there includes some sections of road that I’d rather not bike. But about a month ago, I looked at a map, and realized that a longer and safer alternate route was shorter than I anticipated. So I gave it a try. It turns out that even though I’d chosen a longer route on a bike than in the car, it still took the same 25 minutes to get to Franke Park. But instead of a frustrating trip with bad drivers, traffic lights that are always against me, and thoughts of how much gas I’m wasting, taking the bike route is a relaxing warm-up before the real ride. So now I’ve been mountain biking twice a week. And because I’m not wasting an hour getting my bike to the park and back, I am able to ride for an hour longer than I could if I drove there.

Even though I’m heading most of the way across town, I can still make the trip in the same time on bike or in a car. This shows that if you are in a city, it is worth comparing travel times in a car and on bike. Once traffic is taken into account, cars don’t necessarily have an advantage.