AUCKLAND, NZ – This week, I missed Wednesday.Normally, the perils of crossing the International Date Line en route to field sites don’t bother me. After all, who really minds missing the middle of the working week?But this time, Wednesday’s absence bothered me. That’s because two days ago, California officially opened its carbon cap and trade market with the first sale of emissions permits since the state passed landmark climate change legislation six years ago.
I’ve been meaning to write a column on steady-state economics for some time. Last year, I even did some preliminary research, before getting caught up in topical current events instead. Then, last week, I returned to my internet perusal, again typing in my search phrase, “zero growth economy.” To my consternation, the results had changed dramatically. While the radically different economic philosophy I was after still topped the list, many of the recent hits came from news articles reporting on the dire economic straits of Europe, the United States, and even China.
AUCKLAND, NZ – Twelve hours after liftoff from San Francisco airport, fifteen hours after my roommate dropped me off at the international terminal, I was hauling my luggage toward my connecting gate when the strap of my laptop bag abruptly tore off. Fortunately, somewhere in the back of my sleepy brain, I remembered that I’d packed a backup for the cheaply made bag, which hadn’t looked quite up to the task I’d asked of it. I re-packed books and electronics in a canvas tote, and ditched the ruined mess of plasticy fabric at the next trashcan.
When I was small, the word “desert” conjured images of towering Saharan dunes: windswept sand punctuated by rare oases, the only sign of life an occasional animal track quickly buried by the next sandstorm. Then, when I was 13, my parents took me to the Southwest. We visited Saguaro, Joshua Tree, and other parts of the Mojave Desert, chased tarantulas, and watched cactus wrens build nests.
CHERRY HILL, NJ -- Standing next to my Dad under the watchful eyes of the sculpted Jesus I remembered well from childhood church services, I resolutely censored a mental curse. I hadn't attended Catholic mass regularly in years, and while I was embarrassed by my stumbling responses to some recently-reworded portions of the service, I was still absolutely certain of profanity's sacrilege during this particular Sunday hour.Whenever I'm home for a visit, I'm reminded of religion's formative importance during a childhood that included attending weekly mass and religion classes, singing in the children's choir, and, later, lectoring during services.
End-of-year academic stress getting you down? Here’s a spirit-lifting tip: Open your browser and Google “Heartland billboard.”You’ll quickly find The Heartland Institute’s latest propaganda piece: a mugshot of Ted Kaczynski next to the words, “I still believe in Global Warming. Do you?” Heartland’s not-so-subtle subtext: If you think the climate is changing, you’re no better than terrorists like the Unabomber.The billboard, which appeared alongside a Chicago highway, was the first in a series that, Heartland said, would have included other standout characters like Osama bin Laden and Charles Manson.
Last week, word came from Prudhoe Bay that sent chills through me as surely as if I’d been standing in the Alaskan North Slope drilling outpost myself. The United States Department of Energy – in collaboration with energy giant ConocoPhillips and the Japanese nationalized minerals corporation – reported success from a month-long test extraction of methane gas tucked into an icy lattice below the permafrost.
ST. HELENA, CA – It’s a fine Saturday, and the traffic lines up on Highway 29 as the day’s crop of tourists meander from vineyard to vineyard along the road that bisects Napa Valley. By year’s end, 4.5 million people will have passed through, sampling vintages from the state that grows 92% of the nation’s grapes and supplies 60% of its wine. More than 200 million cases of California wine are sold within the United States each year; a further 250 million find their homes abroad. California is the world’s fourth largest wine exporter, after Italy, France, and Spain.And Napa Valley is at the heart of it all.
Every once in a while, I like to go for a run on the beach. One of my favorite spots to hit the sand is San Gregorio State Beach – it lies just across the Santa Cruz range, is invariably quiet early on weekday mornings, and offers a good stretch of hard-packed sand along a southern route toward Pomponio State Beach.At least, when the tide is out.
Let me begin by saying that I bleed blue. Not Yankee blue or horseshoe crab copper — IBM Blue. I was raised on a corporate paycheck and through all the years my mother worked for the computing giant (and the months I spent in sales internships with them) I never once shook an unfriendly hand or doubted a coworker’s ethics. We were all good people, selling a good product that we believed in — that I still believe in.But we were also part of corporate America, hard at work building the fortunes of the 1 percent.How can I reconcile what I know about the personhood of employees with the faceless and troubling power that big business wields on Wall Street and Capitol Hill?
By the time Dr. Maciej Zwieniecki returned to the blackboard, I’d gotten sufficiently lost in the intricacies of fluid dynamics that I wasn’t sure how much more I could absorb from his lecture on vertical water transport in trees. Still, I could objectively admire his off-the-cuff artwork as he brushed away a cross-section of a tree and quickly outlined a perfectly recognizable…fighter jet?The audience watched, bemused. Maciej chuckled, then explained how mechanisms borrowed from tree physiology might one day be used to efficiently transfer heat from jet wings to the cockpit. At least, that’s what the Department of Defense, which funded his basic research on tree mechanics, hoped.
Turkey Day is coming, and with it, the deadline for Obama’s 12-member “Super Committee,” a group of Congress members tasked with carving $1.2 trillion off our national debt.If the bipartisan group can even reach a deal (so far, they’ve missed their own deadline by at least ten days, flatly refused each others’ proposals and been awfully closed-lipped about possible compromises), it seems like everyone’s going to feel the pinch.Everyone, that is, who can’t buy his or her way out of it.Last week, the American Petroleum Institute — the notorious “Big Oil” lobby representing Chevron, Exxon Mobil, Shell and others — started running ads thanking Republican super committee members for preserving industry-specific tax breaks worth $40 billion over the next ten years.
