Richard Florida reports the results of a poll of what should be done with the 2000+ car dealerships being shuttered as a result of the bankruptcy reorganizations of Chrysler and GM:

• Ask the local residents about what the community needs (222 votes)
• Urban gardens (200 votes)
• Create walkable, vibrant places and improve current communities (138 votes)
• Farmers’ markets and local events (126 votes)
• Solar and wind energy park/vehicle charging stations (102 votes)

Odd, no, that the main concern of the respondents doesn’t involve the owners turning the space into something that will generate profits and enable them to continue to employ dozens of people per location?  One supposes that farmers markets and vehicle charging stations could replace some of the lost jobs; not so much “urban gardens” and “walkable, vibrant places.”

For that matter, the “planetizens” seem to have an odd sense of spacial relationships.  Aside from perhaps a handful of megastores, few car lots are big enough to turn into enjoyable parks, let alone put up enough wind turbines to make up a useful energy production facility.

Photo by Flickr user themarina under Creative Commons license.

Since this is my last entry in the debate, I’d like to thank Bernard Finel for what I think has been an excellent, interesting, and informative debate. I’ve accomplished what I set out to do when I was moved to propose this debate: I’ve established that complete disengagement with the Middle East (the resolution of the debate) would be imprudent and Bernard agrees with me:

Engagement and disengagement are not binary values. My call is not for zero presence, but rather for a diminished visibility of our role in the region

That’s not what I drew from Bernard’s article that prompted my suggestion nor is it what I drew from his affirmative case. I still don’t have a clear idea of what Bernard is proposing. I do see that he’s dissatisfied with things as they are, a view I share.

I also believe that he and I agree that we should de-emphasize our military commitment to the Middle East somewhat. Where we appear to differ is in what the nature of our continuing engagement with the Middle East should be.

I’ll now consider some of Bernard’s arguments seriatim.

Oil

Let’s dispense with the oil issue first since it’s the easiest. The spreadsheet of oil prices that Bernard produced is highly informative but rather than proving his case it proves mine. Policies aren’t arrived at by averages but by events. The price spike of 1979-1980 was produced by the deteriorating security situation in the Middle East I sketched in my argument. The price spike of 1986 was caused by the so-called Tanker War during the Iran-Iraq War. That each of those was followed by an increase in U. S. military involvement in the Middle cannot mean that they were caused by that involvement although that increased involvement may have had increased hostility to the United States as a secondary effect. I think the message is rather clear: if the states of the Middle East want us to reduce our military engagement

There is currently no way for us to avoid dependence on oil. Even if we produced every single drop of oil that we consumed, since oil is fungible, the Gulf states are major oil producers, and they are the lowest cost producers we would still be dependent on Gulf oil. An oil price shock would affect us under those circumstances as much as it would now. The quantified effects of closing the Straits of Hormuz are estimated to be around $200 billion per year, i.e. more than the cost of the military engagement that Bernard has cited.

There is no alternative to oil at hand and will not be for the foreseeable future. There is no production-ready electric car, there’s no reason to believe that a practical one will be producible in production quantities at a reasonable cost for the foreseeable future, and if neither of those were true we’d still remain dependent on oil for the foreseeable future for two reasons.

It rarely makes discussions of oil independence but even if a production electric car were ready it will take twenty years for us to turn over the complete oil-burning vehicle fleet. That’s a matter of mathematics and economics as well as logistics. 100 million vehicles at $40,000 a pop (on average) cost $4 trillion. If you can produce the batteries in those quantities which nobody knows how to do yet. A price shock in oil would be an economic catastrophe for us for every year of those twenty years.

And even that’s not the whole of it. Our current electrical grid doesn’t have the excess capacity to handle the additional load required to recharge all those electric vehicles, it will take us decades to update our grid, and it will cost trillions more.

But that’s a parochial view. Our investment in stability in the commerce in oil through the Gulf maintains price stability not only for us but for our European and Asian allies and, equally importantly, for every poor country in the world that is far less willing to pay for turning over its vehicle fleet or upgrading its electric grid than we are. Our investment keeps those countries stable and the world at peace.

Terrorism and security interests

There’s little reason to believe that disengagement from the Middle East will result in a reduction of the threat from terrorism. As my good friend Mark Safranski put it, that’s not merely counter-intuitive, it’s lacking in real world evidence. Terrorists have their own intrinsic motivations; they aren’t merely responding to our actions although those may be among the explanations they present for their actions.

The most dangerous, awful anti-American regimes in the world aren’t those with whom we have high levels of engagement, they’re those, like Iran and North Korea, with whom our engagement is very limited.

It isn’t disengagement that will lead to a more positive view of America and Americans but more engagement as the polling data I’ve linked to suggests. Here’s an additional example.

Recent arrests in Belgium have rounded up members of a terrorist ring who apparently were planning an attack in Brussels. Belgium hasn’t been part of the coalition in Iraq and its military involvement in Afghanistan has been nominal. Both its footprint and its fingerprint in the Middle East are quite small. Nonetheless the Belgians are a target for terrorist activities.

Israel

Israel doesn’t figure prominently in my own calculus of American interests in the Middle East and I wish that the nature of the relationship between Israel and the United States were somewhat different than it is now. Howsomever it remains that Israel is our closest ally in the Middle East, there is a substantial constituency in the United States that would render major disengagement from Israel politically impossible, and I have little reason to believe that such disengagement would produce more security for us, the Israelis, for the Middle East, or for the world. In particular I don’t see how major disengagement from the Middle East would motivate the Israelis to arrive at a settlement with the Palestinians nor do I see how relinquishing our strongest bargaining chips—our engagement with the Middle East—would strengthen our hand in achieving such a settlement.

Increased engagement

Bernard wrote:

Our embassies are massive concrete structures, set back from the road, with triple rings of security barriers. Our businesses operate behind barbed wire and are protected by private security. Americans travel in armed convoys and stay in secluded hotels that also feature fortress-like precautions.

Does that describe Egypt, Jordan, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates? Or many other countries in the Middle East and North Africa? Perhaps someone better informed than I could comment.

I think that’s a description of Iraq. We can’t undo the harm to our long term interests in the Middle East that our invasion of Iraq has caused. Nor am I prepared to argue that on net the invasion was a good thing.

Over the next several years we’ll be removing something like half of the troops we have in Iraq which I support as the security situation there has clearly improved substantially.

Bernard scoffed at the possibility of trade with the Middle East. Let’s take a single example: Jordan. Currently the European Union does something like $4 billion per year in exports to Jordan. The U. S. does something like $650 million, only about 6% of the total. It certainly looks to me as though there’s a market there and room for improvement on our part. There’s a similar pattern throughout the Middle East and North Africa.

Emphasis on trade liberalization and increased trade with the Middle East will not only improve the people who live there’s opinion of us but it will improve their way of life, making them more prosperous and happier. And that in turn will make all of us more secure.

Conclusion

The reason I proposed a debate on the subject was simply because the format of a debate calls for the burden of proof to fall on the affirmative. That’s not a trick; that’s the definition. Debating requires the affirmative to meet the burden of proof. I’m not surprised that Bernard doesn’t much care for the format because the real world evidence points the other way.

In the final analysis it actually appears to me that Bernard and I have many points of agreement: we shouldn’t disengage from the Middle East completely, our military engagement with the region is too great. I see no way to reduce our “fingerprint” on the region for the foreseeable future and think that our best interests lie in increased engagement. That’s our historical experience and that’s what the opinions of people all over the world support.

We need to engage with the world rather than withdraw from it and the Middle East is no exception to that but the engagement should not be so heavily in the form of military engagement. More butter, fewer guns.

Question 1 (Finel): You write: “I believe the evidence speaks clearly: the increased U. S. engagement in the region has overall been a stabilizing force.” What is the precise benefit to the United States of this increased stability? Are American interests in the region more or less secure today as a result? Or is this purely a altruistic argument on your part?

Schuler: I won’t deny that my motives are partly altruistic but that’s not the only reason we should want stability in the Middle East. Avoidance of oil price shocks doesn’t just benefit the United States but every country that buys oil whether they’re in South America, Africa, or Asia. Some of the governments in these places are holding on very tenuously as it is. An oil price shock could send them over the edge. We recently saw risks of that in Pakistan.

Pakistan recently applied for a World Bank loan because of the high price of oil. The significantly higher price spike caused by an interruption in Gulf oil might well have sent them over the edge. That presents a very real direct security threat to us. The Pakistani government is bad enough at preventing terrorist training camps from operating in the country as it is; a failure of that government would make matters even worse. Additionally, our supply lines for Afghanistan run through Pakistan. A collapse of the Pakistani government would be a very bad thing for our troops there.

Repeat that in Central America, South America, and Africa and you’d aggravate the poverty and misery in the countries in those areas. People in poor, chaotic places can be driven to great lengths. They resort to piracy as in Somalia or drug production and trafficking as in Afghanistan. They go where they think they might find work or relief—here, France, Italy, the United Kingdom. That places strains on our health and educational systems among others, not to mention social stresses.

And people living in prosperous countries make better customers for American goods and services than people in poor, chaotic countries do. Improving security is a fine example of doing good while doing well.

Question 2 (Finel): You quote from Sayyid Qutb. What evidence can you produce to show that Qutbism is followed by anything more than a tiny sliver of the population of the Middle East?

Schuler: A recent Pew poll suggested that roughly 8% of Muslims living in the United States expressed opinions which I’d interpret as radical Islamist ones. The number of foreign-born Muslims, particularly Arabs, who expressed such views among the whole was somewhat higher. I wouldn’t be surprised if 10% of the population of the Middle East had such views. That’s tens of millions of people.

The membership of the Muslim Brotherhood is certainly estimated to be in the millions. I don’t think there’s any doubt that his teachings are very influential.

I’m not certain whether the absolute numbers are particularly important. There weren’t a lot of Japanese who believed that Japan should attack the United States sixty years ago and only a very small number actually took part in the attack. We engaged in total war against the Japanese anyway. My point is emphatically not that we should be engaging in total war but that a relatively small number of people can create a lot of misery.

Question 3 (Finel): How would you guarantee the security of “American tourists, American products, American students, and, especially, American businessmen”? Which of the security measures undertaken after the 1998 embassy bombings would you reverse in order to encourage greater contact between these groups and the people of Middle Eastern countries?

Schuler: It’s certainly a problem and I’m open to suggestions. I don’t know that I’m advocating reversing any of the post-1998 measures. I’m not advocating a sudden flood of Americans but a gradual increase. American businesses aren’t doing as much business as they could be in the Middle East and North Africa and real as opposed to perceived security concerns probably aren’t the most important reason for that.

Clearly, some places are riskier than others. Iraq would be pretty darned risky. However, to the best of my knowledge there’s only been one murder of an American in Jordan over the period of the last 20 years. There are all sorts of places in the Middle East and North African where American tourists and businessmen aren’t in considerably more danger than British or French tourists or businessmen and the British and French are doing quite a bit of business in the Middle East.

It would also help if there weren’t exaggerated and mistaken impressions given in our own media. For example, the early reports of the attacks in Mumbai last month emphasized that the terrorists were after Americans and Britons. Later reports tended to refute that. There’s never been a definitive answer to whether that was the case and our media accounts have left us with the impression that Americans were particular targets whether that was the case or not. That makes it hard to assess the actual risks.

The most recent Pew Survey of Global Attitudes found that people in other countries who had more personal exposure to America and Americans were also more likely to have a favorable attitude towards America and Americans. We aren’t going to improve our security situation by barricading ourselves within our borders. Ignorance and isolation are our enemies not our friends.

Question 1: What evidence do you have that reducing our “footprint” and “fingerprint” will result in a reduction of radicalism in the Middle East?

BERNARD FINEL: Obviously, it is impossible to prove a hypothetical, so there is no direct evidence to support my contention that reducing our visibility will reduce radicalism. Indeed, I don’t think it is likely to reduce radicalism at all—what I believe is that it will reduce anti-American radicalism, which is a slightly different argument. I also want to point out that we need to think through carefully the evidentiary requirements of the case for a policy change. If our current policies were working well, then there would be a strong argument for the presumption against a major departure, and hence a high-standard of proof would be required. In the current case, where our Middle Eastern policy is, I think, self-evidently unsatisfactory, the standard of proof for change is lower. That said, I agree with the implicit assumption behind these questions, which is that the first principle ought to be to first do no harm to American interests.

As to the evidence. I come to my conclusion on the basis of both an analysis of public opinion data and by comparison to other countries. First, opinion data: There is deep, deep skepticism of American motives. According to a survey done by Shibley Telhami of opinion in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates, 83% of respondents held an unfavorable view of the United States in 2008. Of that 64% held a “very unfavorable” view. The fundamental reason for this unfavorable opinion is skepticism of American motives. When asked whether the U.S. goal was to “weaken and divide Islam” a worldpublicopinion.org poll in 2007 showed 78% of Moroccan believed that was the U.S. goal, as did 92% of Egyptians and 73% of Pakistanis. This is a common belief in the Middle East. Indeed, it is one of the few obvious sources of anti-American sentiment, along with support for Israel and the Iraq war. On the whole, the public in the Middle East responds positively to American “values”—such as democracy, freedom, and so on. And on the whole, these same publics reject terrorism. So, I think we can infer, from this, that it is the American role in the region that prompts anger and resentment.

Second, do a comparison with other countries. If the issue if “who we are” rather than “what we are (perceived as) doing,” then why are we more unpopular than our European allies who share most of our values. There is no correlate between level of democracy and unpopularity. There is no correlation between percentage of Christians and unpopularity. Muslims in the United States are, on the whole, better integrated into American society than are Muslims in Europe, and yet in the Middle East that is not reflected in a different in public opinion.

If you can explain 83% unfavorable ratings—in countries that are largely American allies—with some other data point, I’m open to reconsidering my argument. But I just think the data leads one to the conclusion that it is American involvement that is generating a backlash.

Now, as a policy matter, does that imply that reducing our footprint would ease this challenge. I really don’t know. I can’t see how it could hurt. But I am also not sure it will help. Just as anti-Semitism often exists even in the absence of Jews, it is possible that anti-Americanism has become so ingrained in modes of political analysis that even if we reduce our presence, we will still be blamed for negative developments in the bizarre conspiracy theories that seem to dominate political analysis in the Middle East. I think reducing our footprint and fingerprints is the best option, but I would not bet the mortgage on it.

Question 2: what evidence do you have that reducing our “footprint” and “fingerprint” will result in enhanced security for Israel or a greater likelihood of the Israelis and Palestinians reaching a mutually agreeable settlement of their differences?

BERNARD FINEL: Actually, I don’t think it will do either of those things, and I apologize if I gave that impression. About Israeli security — my view is that the Israelis can take care of themselves. They are a nuclear armed state with the best conventional military in the region. Deterrence should hold against state actors. In terms of non-state actors, I think the answer lies in multilateral non-proliferation initiatives — fissile material cut-offs, international nuclear fuel banks, and so on. Unilaterally whacking countries that might someday become a threat to Israel seems to me an inefficient approach, and one that will make the U.S. and Israel increasingly unpopular thus feeding the problem we seek to resolve.

About the Israeli-Palestinian dispute… actually, I don’t think there is a negotiated solution available, and I just think that it is mistake to be so involved that we get blamed when no agreement arises. I also think it is a mistake to raise false hopes. My view here is that we should acknowledge we have no power over the situation, offer our assistance if requested, but otherwise try to break the notion that the road to peace in the Middle East somehow runs through Washington.

Question 3: what evidence do you have that pursuing “alternative energy, oil exploration at home, better fuel efficiency from cars” will result in a substantial reduction in oil use in the near term in the United States let alone in the long term? How large a reduction and in what time frame?

BERNARD FINEL: My argument is a long-term one actually. I come at the issue from the reverse perspective. Is there any reason why, even given today’s technology, we “need” to use oil? No. Replacing the roughly 9% of electricity generated by oil-fired power plants is within easy reach by a combination of coal, nuclear, solar, and wind. The bigger issue is the use of oil in the transportation sector. Here there are again plenty of existing solutions — plug-in electric, hydrogen-powered, natural gas, etc. The big challenge in making a switch is primarily infrastructure. The cost of building out this infrastructure is massive… but so is the cost of fighting wars in the Middle East and maintaining power-projection capabilities for regional contingencies there.

According to Energy Independence Now, converting all of California’s gas stations to carry hydrogen would cost roughly $5 billion. Extrapolate that to the rest of the country and we are looking at maybe a $50 billion price tag. Add in investments in generation capacity—maybe twice that again, so another $100 billion. We spend roughly $150 billion in purchasing foreign oil every year (the figure varies with prices, of course). For the money we spend in a single year on foreign oil, we could make a major dent in a hydrogen infrastructure. Hydrogen is still more costly than oil if you don’t take into account the political and military costs associated with oil dependency. If you do, the gap closes. But you don’t need to replace all oil. Just reduce our use and exposure to the point that we don’t feel compelled to be a regional policeman.

Just a caveat—the numbers on energy independence are all over the map. It depends on how quickly you do it, which technologies, assumptions about economies of scale, etc. My point is, we spend $150 billion on foreign oil, we spend perhaps another $100 billion annually in supporting military capacity and political engagements to reduce risk in access to that oil, and we spend tens of billions more a year in mitigating the consequence of this dependence. There is a massive amount of resources locked up in the status quo. Oil dependence is not cheap.

I wrote a quick post before bed last night giving my off-the-cuff reaction to Barack Obama’s nomination acceptance speech, arguing that, despite all the talk of “change,” it was basically a speech that Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, or John Kerry could have given.

The NYT has a six-page transcript of the speech as delivered.  Let’s skip the biography and gotcha attack lines and go through the policy pronouncements.  These are problems for which he’s blamed George W. Bush and has promised to fix if elected president.

[M]ore Americans are out of work and more are working harder for less. More of you have lost your homes and even more are watching your home values plummet. More of you have cars you can’t afford to drive, credit cards, bills you can’t afford to pay, and tuition that’s beyond your reach.

Exactly zero of these are within the power of the president to fix. Seriously, what does he propose to do about housing prices reaching equilibrium and people borrowing to live lifestyles they can’t afford?

We’re a better country than one where a man in Indiana has to pack up the equipment that he’s worked on for 20 years and watch as it’s shipped off to China, and then chokes up as he explains how he felt like a failure when he went home to tell his family the news.

So, we’re going to ban trade with China? Ban American companies from participating in the global marketplace? Radically raise the cost that 300 million Americans pay for consumer goods to keep a relative handful of people employed in sectors where First World nations have lost their comparative advantage?

We are more compassionate than a government that lets veterans sleep on our streets and families slide into poverty…

So, we’re going to return to locking up drug addicts and people with non-dangerous mental disorders? We’re going to guarantee everyone a minimum income?

We measure the strength of our economy not by the number of billionaires we have or the profits of the Fortune 500, but by whether someone with a good idea can take a risk and start a new business, or whether the waitress who lives on tips can take a day off and look after a sick kid without losing her job, an economy that honors the dignity of work.

Don’t people start new businesses every day in this country? And isn’t his party the one that wants to erect regulatory barriers making it harder to start new businesses? For that matter, don’t waitresses get days off already? I’m pretty sure they do.

Implicit in this sentence, though, are the inherent contradictions in Democratic domestic policy. The more mandates we put on small businesses, the harder it is for them to succeed. Sure, it would be great if even unskilled labor got terrific benefits, including paid family leave. But somebody’s got to pay for that. If it’s the customer, it makes the product or service less attractive. If it’s coming out of the owner’s pocket, it makes hiring employees less attractive. If it’s the government, it takes money out of everyone’s pocket — including those with dreams of starting their own business. Including the very waitress who we’re trying to help. Whose salary, incidentally, will naturally go down as a result of the policy — if she’s hired to begin with.

Ours — ours is a promise that says government cannot solve all our problems, but what it should do is that which we cannot do for ourselves: protect us from harm and provide every child a decent education; keep our water clean and our toys safe; invest in new schools, and new roads, and science, and technology.

Now this is terrific line. It starts off appealing to conservatives and moderates and then promises a chicken in every pot. Who can be opposed to these things, after all? Why, mean old out-of-touch people like John McCain, that’s who!

But how does this translate into policy?

Protect us from harm. Keeping foreign enemies from attacking us and domestic criminals from terrorizing the innocent is the fundamental purpose of government, one could argue. But we’ve been trying to do these things since Day 1. One suspects, though, he’s defining “harm” much more broadly.

Decent education for all. I’m for it. But isn’t that a local responsibility? The federal government doesn’t run too many schools, after all, aside from those on military bases and diplomatic outposts. And what does “decent” mean, exactly?

Are we going to have government only do “that which we cannot do for ourselves”? Or is it going to invest in science and technology?

Change means a tax code that doesn’t reward the lobbyists who wrote it, but the American workers and small businesses who deserve it.

Don’t workers and small businesses have lobbyists? And why is government in the business of deciding who “deserves” to keep the money they earned?

I will stop giving tax breaks to companies that ship jobs overseas, and I will start giving them to companies that create good jobs right here in America.

They’re the same companies!

I will — listen now — I will cut taxes — cut taxes — for 95 percent of all working families, because, in an economy like this, the last thing we should do is raise taxes on the middle class.

This is another great line. It sounds very New Democrat. But, really, it’s the same old class warfare: We’re going to cut taxes for most people — even though we’ve just listed trillions in new spending programs — while raising them on those already paying the largest burden. But, hey, 19 out of 20 people will like it! Democracy! As Dave Schuler likes to say, “When you rob Peter to pay Paul, you can always count on the support of Paul.”

And for the sake of our economy, our security, and the future of our planet, I will set a clear goal as president: In 10 years, we will finally end our dependence on oil from the Middle East.

We will do this. Washington — Washington has been talking about our oil addiction for the last 30 years. And, by the way, John McCain has been there for 26 of them.

And Joe Biden 35 of them, by the way.

This is sheer fantasy. Of late, it’s become a bipartisan one, since even President Bush has spouted similar platitudes. It’s simply not going to happen.

And I’ll invest $150 billion over the next decade in affordable, renewable sources of energy — wind power, and solar power, and the next generation of biofuels — an investment that will lead to new industries and 5 million new jobs that pay well and can’t be outsourced.

Man, if $150 billion would do this Exxon would already be doing it.

I’ll recruit an army of new teachers, and pay them higher salaries, and give them more support. And in exchange, I’ll ask for higher standards and more accountability.

I suppose they’ll work side-by-side with the 100,000 new policemen Bill Clinton put on the beat.

Teachers are hired, trained, and supervised at the state and local level. Even if we federalize them, how is it that we’re going to attract better caliber people to do a job that’s often thankless and repetitive? Simply by paying them more? And what are these “higher standards”? Test scores? Democrats don’t like that measure. No Child Left Behind, Part Deux.

Granted, Clinton and others have made this promise and it’s almost certainly rhetoric that won’t translate into policy. If it did, though, we’re likely to see the repeat of federalizing airport security screeners: The same people doing the job as before but making more money and even harder to fire for poor performance.

And we will keep our promise to every young American: If you commit to serving your community or our country, we will make sure you can afford a college education.

What does this mean, exactly? If, say, you work in a soup kitchen a couple hours a week, we’ll send you to Harvard?

If you have health care — if you have health care, my plan will lower your premiums. If you don’t, you’ll be able to get the same kind of coverage that members of Congress give themselves.

So, if I don’t have a job, I get the same coverage we provide for 535 elites making executive salaries? Groovy. No scaling problems there.

I will make certain those companies stop discriminating against those who are sick and need care the most.

I think we have different definitions of “insurance.”

Now is the time to help families with paid sick days and better family leave, because nobody in America should have to choose between keeping their job and caring for a sick child or an ailing parent.

See our earlier discussion on this. Look, I’m for this. That’s a situation I’ve never been in and would dearly hate to be in. But who’s going to pay for it? A small business owner with, say, five employees almost certainly can’t afford to pay one of them for an extended period while not reaping the benefits of their work. Nor, realistically, can he afford to pay a temp to come in and do that work while paying the person he’s replacing. Large companies can probably absorb this sort of thing more easily — and many in fact do so — but, then again, large companies have more employees and therefore a greater likelihood of having to pay this out.

Or is this going to be some sort of government insurance program? If so, are we going to pay everyone on a capped basis, as with unemployment insurance? Or are we going to pay, say, an executive with a sick kid $20,000 a month while she’s out? What if her company sends good American jobs to China?

And now is the time to keep the promise of equal pay for an equal day’s work, because I want my daughters to have the exact same opportunities as your sons.

Dude, the 1970s are over.

Obama’s a bright guy. He anticipated these objections and dealt with them squarely:

Now, many of these plans will cost money, which is why I’ve laid out how I’ll pay for every dime: by closing corporate loopholes and tax havens that don’t help America grow.

But I will also go through the federal budget line by line, eliminating programs that no longer work and making the ones we do need work better and cost less, because we cannot meet 21st-century challenges with a 20th-century bureaucracy.

Clearly, the man has seen “Dave.”

I mean, seriously, we’re going to pay for all this by closing loopholes?! We quite literally couldn’t pay for it if we closed the entire federal government excepting the Defense Department and the Social Security Administration.

Yes, government must lead on energy independence, but each of us must do our part to make our homes and businesses more efficient.

The cameras didn’t show Jimmy Carter but I’m sure he was smiling. And wearing a sweater. While turning his thermostat down to 72.

[W]e must also admit that programs alone can’t replace parents, that government can’t turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

Agreed. One small problem: They ain’t gonna.

Turning to foreign policy, the speech was actually much stronger there. I actually agreed with much of it, including some of the contrasts he drew with Bush and McCain. Two exceptions:

You know, John McCain likes to say that he’ll follow bin Laden to the gates of Hell, but he won’t even follow him to the cave where he lives.

We have no clue as to which cave bin Laden lives. Or if he lives in a cave. Or he’s still alive.

Do we seriously believe that, if he could, Bush wouldn’t be killing or capturing bin Laden? His approval ratings would jump 25 points.

We are the party of Roosevelt. We are the party of Kennedy. So don’t tell me that Democrats won’t defend this country. Don’t tell me that Democrats won’t keep us safe.

I agree with the underlying premise here: Of course Democrats want to keep the country safe and, goodness knows, Democrats aren’t any more reluctant to send troops into harm’s way than Republicans. One probably doesn’t want to invoke JFK here, though. Bay of Pigs. Taking us much closer to the brink of nuclear holocaust than we’ve ever been. Vietnam.

Look, I realize that I’m not the target audience here and that convention speeches are often full of platitudes and sops to the base.  My guess is that John McCain’s will be, too — and we’ll criticize that, too.   But don’t base your entire campaign on “CHANGE” and give me warmed over ideas from the Carter administration.

Obama Photo: Linda Davidson/The Washington Post. Magic pony  via Adam Stein.

Last night’s debate for the Colorado Senate seat being vacated by Wayne Allard had a rather amusing moment. Republican Bob Schaffer, a former oil company executive and solar energy advocate, was asked a not-unreasonable question:

Reporter/Debate Panelist Lynn Bartels: “Bob, when you are on the campaign trail, you always pull out that tiny [piece of solar cell material]…you probably have it with you now so you can show people…that you’ve touted as the cutting edge of solar research. How much of your home is solar-powered?”

Schaffer: “My home isn’t…well, to the extent…”

Bartels: “Do you have solar panels at your house?”

Schaffer: “We have windows at our house.”

Not to be outdone, Green Party candidate Bob Kinsey said he had solar panels on his previous home, which he sold in 2002 after his wife died. He does, however, have a solar powered fountain on his deck.

The transcription above is being circulated by the campaign of Schaffer’s Democratic opponent, Mark Udall.  AP’s Steven Paulson reports that Schaffer was “joking.”  Either way, it’s amusing.

via email tip from the Mrs.

MIT chemists have developed a means to electrolyze water at room temperature with photovoltaic cells.

A new catalyst makes it feasible to split water with solar power.

MIT chemists say the catalyst, used in conjunction with cheap photovoltaic solar panels, could lead to inexpensive, simple systems that use water to store the energy from sunlight.

In the process, the scientists may have cleared the major roadblock on the long road to fossil fuel independence: Reducing the on-again, off-again nature of many renewable power sources.

The catalyst enables the electrolysis system to function efficiently at room temperature and at ordinary pressure. Like a reverse fuel cell, it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen. By recombining the molecules with a standard fuel cell, the O2 and H2 could then be used to generate energy on demand.

It’s still up in the air as to whether this would be cost-effective, given that one of the catalyst components is platinum. Still–one of the things holding back solar is the fact that it can’t generate power continuously. So if these chemists have developed a more effective means of storing solar power, that will go a long way towards making it a more viable form of energy. This is definitely something worth keeping an eye on–especially if the technique can be adapted to less expensive catalysts.

(cross posted to Heretical Ideas)

This morning, Glenn Reynolds linked to this bit of news from Popular Science regarding a discovery that could lead to greater efficiencies in solar cells:

MIT engineers have recently helped up the feasibility of widespread solar power by developing a new “solar concentrator.” The concentrator, which is a flat glass panel spread across a large area, gathers light at the edges of its surface. Expensive solar cells only need to sit on these borders – a difference that lowers costs and increases efficiency by 10 to 15 percent.

Scientists rerouted light to the panel’s edges by painting the surface with two or more organic dyes. By joining forces, these dyes absorb light from different wavelengths, thus harnessing as much power as possible. The panels can even be placed on existing solar-power systems – which could increase each cell’s power-capturing ability by 50 percent.

This is just one more bit of good news in an increasing series of good news for the future promise of solar energy. Solar cell prices are on a downward trend, Google plans on building a solar thermal plants, and companies all over the place are developing new techniques for cheaply manufacturing solar cells.

When you couple the advances in solar energy with the possibility that wind power could be providing up to 20% of power output in the U.S. over the next 20 years, there’s a lot of good news here. The best part about solar, from my perspective, is that as solar cells get cheaper, there’s a great opportunity for them to supplement the grid through sheer ubiquity. If energy from coal and natural gas keep going up while solar cells get cheaper and more efficient, you’re going to see a lot more solar cells on rooftops. That’s a good thing.

Photo: Chance Gardener’s photostream

It seems that the leading man-made cause of global warming is environmentalism; specifically, efforts to improve air quality by reducing pollution, New Scientist reports.

Since 1980, average air temperatures in Europe have risen 1 °C: much more than expected from greenhouse-gas warming alone. Christian Ruckstuhl of the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland and colleagues took aerosol concentrations from six locations in northern Europe, measured between 1986 and 2005, and compared them with solar-radiation measurements over the same period. Aerosol concentrations dropped by up to 60 per cent over the 29-year period, while solar radiation rose by around 1 watt per square metre (Geophysical Research Letters, DOI: 10.1029/2008GL034228). “The decrease in aerosols probably accounts for at least half of the warming over Europe in the last 30 years,” says Rolf Philipona, a co-author of the study at MeteoSwiss, Switzerland’s national weather service.

Say Anything’s Piligrim finds this terrifically amusing:  “Well now, there’s a moral dilemna for you. If we go back to eating roots and berries and living in pre-industrial all natural bliss, one with nature and all that, we might end up with a warmer planet than if we just went ahead and enjoyed ourselves.”

Of course, clean air is a good thing in and of itself.  I was, however, under the impression that the rationale for getting rid of aerosols (or, more accurately, the hydroflourocarbons that propelled them) was because we thought they were destroying the ozone layer and thereby increasing harmful ultraviolet rays from the sun.  It would be quite odd, indeed, if our solution to the problem yielded the same results in a different way.

UPDATE:  Commenters tell me that, in this case, aerosols have nothing to do with aerosol spray cans but simply particulates in the air.  Oddly, the report in New Scientist Environment is entitled “Cleaner skies explain surprise rate of warming” and the linked abstract is unhelpful. Is the Web headline misrepresenting the article itself?

I’ve updated the headline and illustration to eliminate confusion, although I remain somewhat confused as to what the study actually reports.

UPDATE II: A reader has sent me a PDF copy of the entire journal article which I’ve uploaded here.  I’ve made a quick scan and, frankly, still don’t understand it.

Illustration:  NASA Earth Observatory

The Bureau of Land Management has placed a two year moratorium on new solar power projects proposed for building on public lands.

Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.

The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.

Now, this won’t affect any pending proposal–apparently there are about 130 in the works. But at least on face, this ban doesn’t appear to make a lot of sense. It seems to me that there isn’t any reason why the BLM couldn’t study the environmental impacts of solar power while still allowing new proposals–as new information is gathered, the EIR’s for new projects could just be changed accordingly. At a time when we’re giving due consideration to opening up new oil and gas projects on public lands, a freeze on solar power seems counterproductive.

John McCain has proposed offering a $300 million dollar prize to the developer of “breakthrough battery technology.”

Senator John McCain on Monday proposed the creation of a $300 million prize for anyone who developed breakthrough car-battery technology and he recommended greater tax incentives for buyers of nonpolluting autos, saying that only a combination of increased oil production, conservation measures and ingenuity could ease the fuel crisis and slow global warming.

[...]

Perhaps McCain’s most striking proposal was the $300 million prize “for the development of a battery package that has the size, capacity, cost and power to leapfrog the commercially available plug-in hybrids or electric cars.”

That’s not a bad idea, assuming that the prize conditions are well defined. I’ve always preferred the incentive approach to research as opposed to direct subsidies. Plus, if the car battery principles can be applied to other energy storage, it might help boost the transition to fluctuating power sources such as solar and wind.

(link via Balloon Juice)

The proprietor of the FiveCentNickel blog quantifies in a way I haven’t seen previously just how enormous the challenge of ending our dependence on oil — a favorite canard of politicians on both sides of the aisle — really is. Drawing on a piece by CNET’s Michael Kanellos, he lays out the numbers.

Essentially, world energy consumption for 2006 (the last year for which comprehensive data were available) was approximately cubic mile of oil (CMO) plus “the equivalent of three CMOs from all energy sources.”

What are the alternatives for replacing that first CMO?

Solar panels

Assuming annual electricity capture of 2.1 megawatts per solar panel, we’d have to place them on 4.2 billion rooftops. In other words, we’d have to install on them on 250,000 roofs per day for the next 50 years to have enough solar panels to offset our current annual oil usage (and this ignores things like coal; see below).

Wind power

What about wind power generators? You’d need 3 million to equal one CMO. That would require the installation of 1,200 per week for the next 50 years.

Hydroelectric power

A large hydroelectric dam can generate roughly 18 gigawatts of power per year. Thus, to offset one CMO of energy, we’d have to build 200 major hydroelectric dams. The problem? There aren’t enough rivers left in the world to dam up.

Solar thermal power

It would require 7,700 solar thermal plants to offset one CMO. That would require the construction of 150 plants per year for 50 years. Unfortunately, just one has been built in the past 15 years.

Nuclear power plants

It would take 2,500 nuclear power plants producing 900 megawatts to produce the equivalent of one CMO worth of energy. In other words, we’d have to build one a week for 50 years. It’s also worth noting that nuclear power isn’t exactly renewable.

Oh, and energy demands are escalating at a rapid rate, with one estimate cited that we’ll need six CMOs to meet that demand thirty years from now.

Carpooling and better lightbulbs probably aren’t going to cut it. That’s not to say that we shouldn’t conserve, implement available alternatives where practicable, and continue to explore other options. It’s going to be tremendously difficult.

Via Jim Henley’s shared Google Reader feed

The Washington Post has a heartbreaking article which might as well be titled “The More Things Change…” regarding our current “progress” in Fallujah:

[Col. Faisal Ismail al-]Zobaie, 51, knows the nature of the men in black masks. He is a former insurgent. Now, as the police chief, he has turned against the insurgency, especially al-Qaeda in Iraq. The U.S. military showcases Fallujah as a model city where U.S. policies are finally paying off and is spending hundreds of millions of dollars in the region to promote the rule of law and a variety of nation-building efforts.

But the security that has been achieved here is fragile, the result of harsh tactics recalling the rule of Saddam Hussein, who was overthrown five years ago. Even as they work alongside U.S. forces, Zobaie’s men admit they have beaten and tortured suspects to force confessions and exact revenge.

In the city’s overcrowded, Iraqi-run jail, located inside a compound that also houses a U.S. military base and U.S. police advisers, detainees were beaten with iron rods, according to the current warden. Many were held for months with no clear evidence or due process. They were deprived of food, medical care and electricity and lived in utter squalor, said detainees, Iraqi police and U.S. military officers, who began to address the problems three weeks ago. Last summer, the warden said, several detainees died of heatstroke.

In Zobaie’s world, to show mercy is to show weakness. In a land where men burn other men alive, harsh tactics are a small price to pay for imposing order, he said.

“We never tortured anybody,” he said. “Sometimes we beat them during the first hours of capture.”

The article goes on to describe exactly what life is like in Fallujah today:

Fallujah today is sealed off with blast walls and checkpoints. Residents are given permits to enter the city. All visitors and their weapons are registered, and police check every car. The U.S. military has divided the city into nine gated communities, each with its own joint security station staffed by U.S. troops and Iraqi police. It also has been buying the loyalties of former Sunni insurgents, paying them $180 a month to join a neighborhood force that works with the police.

Those tactics have damped down the violence. Shops stay open longer, streets are clogged with traffic, and soccer fields brim with children and young men. But for many residents, Fallujah remains a shadow of its former self. “The city is like a big jail,” said Abu Ahmed, a well-known doctor who asked that his nickname be used because he has treated people who were brutalized by Zobaie’s men.

Zobaie ordered imams at mosques to stop preaching in support of the insurgency and against American troops. The mosques have long been a breeding ground for insurgents. Sheik Abu Abdul Salman, an influential 67-year-old imam, didn’t like Zobaie’s order. “He’s worse than Saddam Hussein,” Salman said.

When Zobaie heard of the remark, his voice rose in anger. “Sometimes people are just saying that I did this, I did that. . . . Okay, I tell them, ‘Where were you when al-Qaeda was running this city?’ “

And the end result that Zobaie is working for?

Zobaie has asked the U.S. officers to help obtain more aid for the city from the regional and central governments. Already, the U.S. military is employing street cleaners, building schools and putting up $9 million worth of solar street lights. But some U.S. officers question why insurgents once determined to kill them have so quickly embraced them.

“Every time they talk to you there’s an agenda,” said Miller, the captain who works closely with Zobaie. “You have to figure out what they want right now. If it is this easy, it begs the question: What are we giving them that we don’t know that we’re giving them?”

What Zobaie wants is for the U.S. military to hand over full control of Fallujah. He believes Iraq’s current leaders are not strong enough. Asked whether democracy could ever bloom here, he replied: “No democracy in Iraq. Ever.”

“When the Americans leave the city,” he said, “I’ll be tougher with the people.”

Read the whole article, because what I’ve left out is the American blase attitude towards life in Fallujah today. Not that I blame them. The military simply lacks the resources and political support to build institutions in Iraq that could one day lead to a more liberal state. So instead, in the name of “security”, we’re building up a totalitarian state in the middle of Iraq. Sure, Zobaie is anti-al-Qaeda, but I’ll bet that Saddam Hussein would have been, too, if we’d paid him enough.

One of the things that annoys me is the periodic nonsense about becoming energy independent. This idea that we can “wean ourselves off of oil” is just utter nonsense. The reason for this is that if there were economically viable alternatives to oil as a source of energy that source would be in use today and it would become more and more prevalent. The reality is 180 degrees in the opposite direction.

Even with oil going over $100/barrel there is no substitute to be found. Ethanol whether form switch grass or corn is a pipe dream. We couldn’t grow enough corn or switch grass to satisfy our demands for oil. While the idea moving to nuclear power is one I like, it wont do much to address our dependence on oil. After all, nuclear power is used primarily to generate electricity and most electric cars are not able to compete with cars that run on gasoline.

All other alternative/green sources of energy rely heavily on government subsidies. In short, we pay twice for these types of power. The first time we pay via taxes, then we pay again when we buy the power, and usually at a premium. Without these subsidies, we wouldn’t see these forms of power. Wind, solar, and biomass all rely on subsidies from some level of government.

Can consider this interesting point about Saudi Arabia: they import 83,000 barrels of gasoline a day. A country that sits on top of the largest know oil reserves has to import gasoline. Energy independence is simply not a realistic nor even a smart policy option.

Energy independence is like walling oneself off from trade with others. Sure your neighbor might be able to produce widgets at a lower cost than you can produce widgets and you can produce doodads cheaper than your neighbor can produce doodads, but dammit you wont trade because you might become dependent on your neighbor and he could exercise undue influence on you. Never mind that this is a double edged sword and cuts your neighbor just as much. Dammit you are going to take your lower standard of living and be happy with it because you are an American!

If any politician were really and truly serious about addressing the issue of energy independence they’d do it via a Pigouvian tax. They’d put a tax on gasoline, and at the same time reduce another tax–e.g. the payroll tax–and thus get people to substitute way from consuming gasoline. But raising a tax on gasoline isn’t popular so politicians have absolutely now spine in following such a policy. They really don’t mean it when they talk about energy independence.

Update (Dave Schuler)

Discussions of energy independence nettle me as much as they do Steve. Unless you’re entertaining the idea of adopting a policy of autarky, complete self-sufficiency and neither importing nor exporting, it’s objectively impossible to achieve energy independence. Regardless of what you do, how little you consume, or how much you produce, you will continue to be influenced by the performance of other consumers and other producers. You won’t be independent. Since the KSA is the lowest cost producer of oil and oil will be important for the foreseeable future, what happens in Saudi Arabia will continue to be important to us.

Every country that’s ever tried autarky has seen the error of its ways. It’s economic idiocy.

I think that when people say “energy independence” they often really mean “energy self-sufficiency”. A decision to be self-sufficient in energy means you consume no more than you produce. I think there’s a reasonable national interest argument to made for doing that so that emergencies in far-off places with unstable governments would be trials but not disasters. But we still wouldn’t be truly energy independent. That’s an objective that’s beyond our grasp.

RealClearPolitics‘ John McIntyre reminds us that the 2004 convention gave President Bush a large bounce in the polls, while the Democratic convention did next to nothing for John Kerry. He’s got an interesting theory on why that was:

Who did Karl Rove and the GOP strategists chose to put front and center on prime-time television for the American people? Arnold Schwarzenegger, Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Zell Miller.

These prime-time speaking slots were not an accident. For a President who was struggling with sub-50% job approval ratings (ratings that many pundits felt would ensure his loss) these four speakers were meant to send a clear message to Independents and moderate Democrats that they were welcome – and wanted – in a big tent, majority Republican Party.

Starting Tuesday in the state that delivered George W. Bush the presidency in 2000 and in California yesterday and today with the Giuliani and Schwarzenegger endorsements, the Bush/Cheney baton has been passed to John McCain.

Many on the more conservative side of the Republican Party are balking now that the Schwarzenegger, Giuliani, McCain faction looks likely to be the standard bearer in 2008. But with President Bush’s approval ratings hovering in the low 30’s (as opposed to the high 40’s of 2004) and after the wipe out in 2006 where the GOP was annihilated in the Northeast and basically everywhere outside of the South, the Republican party is putting forth – either through luck, serendipity, or design – its most competitive general election candidate, by far.

With the country screaming for change and very ready for a Democratic president, George W. Bush would not win a third term. But if the Democrats nominate the divisive Hillary Clinton over the inspiring Barack Obama, John McCain will be in a very strong position to keep the White House in Republican hands, with one caveat.

Without Schwarzenegger, Giuliani and McCain voters in 2004 George Bush would have lost to John Kerry and without Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity and evangelical voters in 2008 John McCain does not have a chance against Hillary Clinton.

He’s right on both counts.

With Michelle Malkin saying she wouldn’t vote for McCain over Hillary Clinton and the likes of Limbaugh, Hannity, and Bob Novak questioning McCain’s conservative credentials, McCain clearly has a lot of work to do to persuade staunch conservatives that he has far more in common with them than they think.

At the same time, though, McCain’s strength as a general election candidate is that he’s not viewed as an extremist. The hard-line Republican platform on torture, immigration, and the environment is a sure-fire loser in November. Not only does it ensure the GOP will never again be a strong contender in places like California and New York but it means that purple states like Florida, Virginia, North Carolina, Colorado, Ohio, and elsewhere are likely to slide into the blue column.

McCain needs the support of staunch conservatives to win the election. They’re a critical part of his base. But they’re a damned sight short of a majority.

Photo: Charles Dharapak, AP