Tag: talks

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Regulatory humility in practice

It is easy, maybe even stylish, and certainly popular to dismiss our government officials as self-serving, incompetent or both, but it is not true. Sure, as in any human endeavor, there are those who are just in it for the prestige, power and/or promise of future gains.

However, most, in my experience, are good people trying to do a good job. I try to listen to what they say, beyond the sound bites, when they are trying to explain the basis for what they do. I was impressed, for example, with Interior Secretary Sally Jewell and her understanding of energy, especially fracking, and her commitment to managing our lands.
Yesterday I attended at talk by FTC Commissioner Maureen Ohlhausen with what seemed like an unlikely title: Regulatory humility in practice.   In fact, the title is what drew my interest.   The moderator joked that many thought it must be an April fool joke.   Since when is there humility among regulators? She gave a good talk. Starting with a classical allusion, which impresses me.

She talked about Procrustes. In Greek mythology, Procrustes was an innkeeper who liked things orderly. He had a bed that was exactly the right size. If guests were too short for the bed, he stretched them until they fit. If they were too tall, he cut off their feet. Regulators, she averred, were too often like Procrustes. They forget that the purpose of regulation is to improve conditions, not make people fit their preconceived notions of perfection.

Regulatory humility is simple to postulate but hard to practice. Regulators need to know their limitations, prioritize to protect against real, not hypothetical harm, and use the appropriate tools to correct the problem. As I wrote, simple to postulate, but making it work violates many of the laws of bureaucratic physics. Nobody gets rewarded for knowing their limitations and acting on that knowledge. I know from my own experience that more credit comes from “great ideas” and project beginnings than from successful conclusions. It takes real effort and significant self-abnegation not to play the game.

Ms. Ohlhausen pointed out some of the reason why you have to be careful with limitation.   One is that you cannot know all the factors involved.   Regulators do not have the time to collect and analyze all the information and even if you did you probably could not understand it. Furthermore, in a fast changing industry, information is quickly out of date. If you knew everything there was to know about Internet in 2010, you would be pretty much useless today.

Some knowledge is being created by those doing the stuff and much of it is “tacit knowledge,” i.e. the people doing things cannot explain exactly how they do it and nobody can learn it sufficiently in theory. I ride my bike all the time.   Yet I have no idea how to explain how I stay up.   I could look up a physical explanation, but that would be unhelpful and it is obviously unnecessary for a bike rider to know. A rule based on that physics that tried to tell me how to ride would be just as useless and unnecessary.

Even with all these caveat, however, regulators like to regulate. It is what they do. They need to identify places of real harm AND place where regulation can produce real good.  We can identify many bad problems that do not have workable solutions. It is tempting to take action, to do something, but that could be wrong. Regulators should work incrementally and transparently, correcting when things do not work as planned or when secondary consequences make the whole enterprise a net loser.   This is the hard part. People understandably want certainty, or at least the appearance of it. A system that adapts to conditions and allows learning usually works better than a rigid one, but it is by its very nature uncertain.   Regulation may create certainty by freezing in place the current situation. This may be okay, even desirable in some places, but certainly not in others.   It would not have been a good thing to freeze the Internet in place ten or even five years ago.   Innovation is unpredictable and usually messy, but we do need it.

BTW – these lectures feature a modest free lunch. I sat down in a good seat and introduced myself to the others around me.   One guy just mumbled and gave me a furtive look as he continued to eat.   Just before the start of the talk, he picked up his stuff and walked quickly away, never to return. I know that there are those who attend events mostly for the free lunch, but it is churlish to take the food and not listen to the talk, especially because the guy took a place at the table. Others, of course, could fill in, but it is somewhat awkward to get up and move in like that.

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Urban Waterways in Anacostia

I attended the Urban Waterways Symposium to better understand urban environmental issues. They are very different from the ones I am used to. A big difference is that the people involved do not own the land they are trying to conserve. There are lots of rules and lots of other stakeholder. If I notice some erosion that could use some rip-rap, my only concern is how much the rocks will cost and if I can get the kid to move them. It is not so easy in an urban environment.

Former DC Mayor Anthony Williams was the keynote speaker. He was very interesting and funny, but maybe more cerebral than lots of politicians. He joked that it was strange for him going from being a big wheel to an ordinary guy. He jokes that people used to come out to meet him; now he has to be careful not to get a ticket when he parks and walks in by himself. He talked about the need to plan for the 21st Century, pointing out that cities had often shunned their waterfronts in the past but now they embrace them. The Anacostia was still not very embraced. He also contrasted the type of conservation advocated by guys like Theodore Roosevelt (maybe my tradition) and the needs of an urban population. The Roosevelt model conserves nature. People are visitors or living from the natural resources. An urban model has people in but not of nature. They need to be integrated.


I also attended a panel discussion on gentrification. This is an interesting subject with lots of points of view. One of the concerns of people in Anacostia is that if they make it too nice they will be displaced by rich people. One of the speakers talked about gentrification the way I might talk about invasive species. It is a different point of view from mine. I suppose I would be the gentrifier if I moved in and Mariza is doing that with her house in Baltimore. I thought about how close Anacostia is to downtown DC and how the parks are really nice. I could become an invasive there.

I thought about my old neighborhood in Milwaukee. Growing up there, I thought it was the way it was always and would be. I still feel a little possessive about it, although I have not skin in that game anymore. It is only a landscape of memory. Neighborhoods are much more transient than we think. Few of the old neighbors are left. The new people think it has always been that way. Parts of Bay View are gentrifying. It is funny that relatively rich people move into the old worker housing and consider it a step up. I suppose the difference is that they have only a couple people in these houses that used to have families of five or ten kids.
It makes sense to reach out where you go. When I bought the tree farms in Brunswick County, I tried to get to know people so that I could fit in better. I found people were welcoming. They knew things I wanted to know and would share information. It must be as true in the urban environment, maybe more so because there are so many more people around. I want to learn more about this environment and will attend more of these conferences.
My picture up top shows the Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter school, where the conference was held.   It was a old building but very well maintained.   Next is the panel on gentrification.  Below that is MLK Avenue right outside the school and at the bottom is Anacostia Metro.  It is difference from all the other stations I have seen. It does not have the high, vaulted ceilings (although they tried to keep the general look with cross arches) and it barely underground.  Sunlight comes in from upstairs.
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Creole culture

I learned a few things today. First I attended a talk by a poet from New Orleans about Creole culture with Mona Lisa Saloy I visited New Orleans a couple years ago and walked all across the city from the French Quarter to the causeway so I feel a little like I know the place, but it was good to learn a bit more about aspect of the culture.

The creole culture is very old. Mona Lisa described how it was formed from a mix of French and African strains. It is hundreds of years old and related to the Caribbean cultures nearby. She showed pictures of Mardi-Gras, which reminds much of Carnival in Brazil
Smithsonian is doing a series of lectures on “intangible culture.” By its nature, intangible culture is hard to grasp. It is the culture carried in the hearts and minds of people, manifest in behaviors and not in stuff. That means that it is by nature also dynamic and ephemeral and must be renewed with each generation.

Mona Lisa read some of her poetry and it was a performance worth hearing. I imagine that the poem just do not have the same heft if you just read them. The beauty of intangible culture is also it poignancy. You have to be there. It can be experienced and enjoyed but not preserved and only imperfectly transmitted. I recall once driving from Payson, Arizona to Phoenix. It is a beautiful drive down the piney mountains to the desert floor. I remember sublimely beautiful purple clouds at sunset. I thought of taking a picture, but I knew it would not do it justice. We stopped to enjoy the moment, the colors and the warm breeze and the feeling that cannot be expressed. This is how I understand the concept of intangible culture. That is the intangible, cannot be touched or maybe recedes when you try do touch it or have it. It can be described but not really transmitted.
Funny thing. It is what you cannot express that gives life meaning.
Reference
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New Deal murals

The Smithsonian Museum of American Art did a program today on the mural art of the New Deal, especially emphasizing the work of Texas Artist Tom Lea.  These murals were commissioned by the government during the Great Depression.  They were meant to give artists useful work and celebrate America in all its regional diversity.  Most were in public buildings such as post offices, which is why they are currently in some peril.  Structures from the 1930s are often reaching the end of their useful lives.  They are being torn down or converted to other uses.

What I found particularly interesting was the relationships between artists, officials and the people.  This art was never meant as a personal expression of an individual artist.  They were designed by committee; the community made decisions about themes and sometimes about details.   This is what makes them more interesting.

They are not about the artists themselves and their particular vision.  They are bigger than the artist.  They are indeed about self-expression, but not merely self.   Artists were paid in installments.  If they produced something their patrons didn’t want, they might not be paid.  Maybe because it is not the work of an individual artist, the murals are full of allegory and symbolism.  They celebrate the town or region.  Since they were meant to be in public places where people would see them every day, they had to make sense to people every day.   The government paid the artists, but the work was truly market driven.

The focus was a case study of the Texas artist Tom Lea and particularly a mural he did called stampede done for the post office in Odessa, Texas.  Originally, the mural was high on a wall over the tellers.   When people came in, they looked up at it and probably had time to contemplate it while waiting in line.   It was moved when a new post office was built nearby, but it was placed in an out-of-the-way place and at eye level.  Context is important.  Is it really the same work of art in its new location?

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Authors

Being back in Washington has the advantage of being able to do intellectual things, such as attending lectures, at low of no cost.  Alex & I went to two of them this week. We saw Jonah Goldberg launching his new book called the “the Tyranny of Clichés” at AEI and H.W. Brands talking about his new book, “The Heartbreak of Aaron Burr” at Smithsonian.  Both were lively speakers. 

Goldberg says that people use clichés as ways to shut off debate and delegitimize arguments they cannot win.  He gave the example of somebody saying “violence never solved anything.” This often ends a debate.  If you question the statement, it sort of implies that you support or at least accept violence. In fact, violence has solved many problems, especially violent problems.  And non-violence works only against people who are already not very violent.  Gandhi, for example, could be non-violent only because was facing an opponent – the British – that believed in the rule of law and was susceptible to persuasion. There may have been Gandhi type people in Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Soviet Union but they disappeared into concentration camps of Gulags with their voices forever silenced. Usually, potential Gandhis were silence before they even said much of anything at all.  Nazis and communists were skilled at identifying and liquidating potential threats even before they were manifest. 

I enjoyed the Goldberg speech, but it was more along political lines. The H.W. Brands was more intellectually interesting.  He is a historian talking about history and seems to have reached some of the same sorts of conclusions I have about historiography. In fact, when I relate what I recall he said, I am a little worried that it more what I think than a real description. 

Brands talked about the differences between writing novels and writing history.  Novels are more compelling to some people because you can have dialogue and you can know what people are thinking.  Historians almost never can do this. The problem is sources. People tend not to write down all their thoughts and even if they did, the letters or papers tend not to be preserved.

This is the big problem for biographers. Brands said that you can write about extraordinary people because people know that they should keep letters or make notes about what they say. You can sometimes write about ordinary people in extraordinary times because they know to write things down. That is why we can write history of common people during the Civil War because so many people wrote their thoughts.  I thought Brands took a courageous stand when he explained why he couldn’t write biographies of women.  Women, he said, tended not to have available sources.   

You could write a biography of Abigail Adams from her letters to John Adams, but that would mostly be a biography of John too.  In fact, that is what David McCullough did with his biography of John Adams.   This brings another interesting permutation.  The John & Abigail relationship is so rich for historians because they were so often apart when important things were happening.  If they are together, they presumably still talk about these things but they leave no record. 

Another disadvantage of history versus a novel has to do with conclusions.  A novel can produce a story with clear heroes, villains, beginning and endings. History is never so tidy. Beginnings and endings flow into each other and they rarely are clear. History never ends. 

I agreed with Brands’ distinction of mysteries from secrets. A secret is something you don’t know but in theory could find out.   For example, the plan of attack on Pearl Harbor was a secret, but it could have been known by the U.S.  A mystery is cannot be known. A mystery has to do with intentions and aspirations. Many times the person himself doesn’t really know what he wants to do before conditions become clearer. This is the case with the famous treason of Aaron Burr.  

Burr went west and was accused of planning to foment a war or maybe an independent movement in the West.  Brands says that there is no way to know what Burr really planned.  The circumstances never came together to allow him to make his move.   Brands also thinks that Burr probably did not have a firm plan in mind.  He didn’t know what he was planning to do. 

IMO, this is an important thing to remember in history.  We all like the good stories, but there are many mysteries in history.  They are not known to us now and can never be known. We like to think that all would be well if we could just have been sources, but this is not true. They are not unknown; they are unknowable.  

I kept on thinking of the dilemma of history writing. Is there history w/o historians? Obviously, things happen whether or not anybody is there to write them down.  But history is more than just a recording of one thing after another.  That is why we acknowledge Herodotus as the “father of history.” People recorded events long before Herodotus.  Herodotus’ contribution was to try to look at history through a kind of a system, to make explanations, not just record one damn thing after another. This means, however, that historians write their narrative and that their narrative is history. Brands gave the example of constellations. We recognize the big dipper, Aquarius, Scorpio etc. when we look at the night sky. But the stars that make up these constellations are in no way connected. They are thousands of light years apart. But once somebody points out the big dipper, you can never again look at the random jumble of stars w/o seeing the big dipper. We would hope that a historical narrative is more than a mere artificial imposition on a random and meaningless distribution, but clearly the intelligence of the writer imposes order. The interpretation is necessary to make it understandable, but it is not a metaphysical truth. Historical interpretations can change and they do.

In the end we didn’t talk very much about Aaron Burr.  Brands joked that we could get that story out of his book.  He did explain that he tried to write the book to be interesting like a novel.  He was able to do this because there was a good body of letters between Burr and his daughter Theodosia. For details, we need to buy the book.

My top picture shows Brands. He looks very severe in this picture and all the pictures I have seen on his books, but he is very engaging and friendly. The picture don’t do him justice. Below is the Hirshhorn Museum. They had some kind of projection on the building. It was well done. It must be hard to project on a curved surface like that.  

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Habits of Self-Control and Self-Determination

The most successful 20% of the population behave differently from those at the bottom. They are more likely to be married, less likely to have children out of wedlock, more likely to work long hours, more likely to attend church regularly and less likely to abuse drugs or alcohol.  In 1960, there was little difference between the top and the bottom on the indicators measuring those things above. Today the differences are stark. 

There is a kind of reverse hypocrisy at work today. In the past, hypocrisy meant pretending to be virtuous while doing less virtuous in your actual behavior. Today, the most successful Americans, as a statistical group, tend to act virtuously (again by the measures above) but hesitate to be identified as doing so. I am sure that they would consider that the virtue of being non-judgmental, but it could also be seen as a failure to lead.

I heard about this and other things at a very interesting lecture at AEI by Charles Murray.  He is writing a book that tracks the relative decline of American habits. He looked at American indicators from 1960-2008. He stopping in 2008 so as to avoid data that would include the current recession and also studied only the white population to avoid making the discussion about race and also study a population that has remained more stable, i.e. fewer new immigrants. According to his data, the population of 1960 was much more alike in its habits than ours is today. For example, the rate of marriage at the top was 86% while at the bottom it was 83% – hardly a difference. Today the rate of marriage at the top has dropped little to around 83%, but at the bottom it has gone below 50%. Out-of-wedlock births are still rare at the top, but approaching 50% at the bottom.  The hours worked at the top have remained stable, actually increased a little, at the top but dropped at the bottom. Church attendance has dropped in all groups, but still remains high at the top and has dropped like a stone at the bottom.  Murray explains that church attendance correlates with other forms of “social capital” such as volunteering for PTAs, giving blood etc. 
The inflection point was 1964.  Until that time, social indicators were actually improving for all groups, but they have declined since them for people at the bottom. Murray didn’t propose any solutions. Maybe he will in his upcoming book. He pointed out a couple of obvious things that could be overlooked, however. The first is that many problems affect mostly people at the bottom. People at the top live in parts of the city or suburbs that used to be relatively crime free and still are.

Their kids go to schools that used to be good and still are. Most of the people they knew were married and still are. Most of the kids grew up in stable households and still do.The changes since the 1960s really didn’t hurt them.

There is a kind of reverse hypocrisy at work today. In the past, hypocrisy meant pretending to be virtuous while doing less virtuous in your actual behavior. Today, the most successful Americans, as a statistical group, tend to act virtuously (again by the measures above) but hesitate to be identified as doing so. I am sure that they would consider that the virtue of being non-judgmental, but it could also be seen as a failure to lead. I heard about this and other things at a very interesting lecture at AEI by Charles Murray. He is writing a book that tracks the relative decline of American habits. He looked at American indicators from 1960-2008. He stopping in 2008 so as to avoid data that would include the current recession and also studied only the white population to avoid making the discussion about race and also study a population that has remained more stable, i.e. fewer new immigrants.

According to his data, the population of 1960 was much more alike in its habits than ours is today. For example, the rate of marriage at the top was 86% while at the bottom it was 83% – hardly a difference. Today the rate of marriage at the top has dropped little to around 83%, but at the bottom it has gone below 50%. Out-of-wedlock births are still rare at the top, but approaching 50% at the bottom. The hours worked at the top have remained stable, actually increased a little, at the top but dropped at the bottom. Church attendance has dropped in all groups, but still remains high at the top and has dropped like a stone at the bottom.  Murray explains that church attendance correlates with other forms of “social capital” such as volunteering for PTAs, giving blood etc. The inflection point was 1964. Until that time, social indicators were actually improving for all groups, but they have declined since them for people at the bottom.  

Murray didn’t propose any solutions. Maybe he will in his upcoming book. He pointed out a couple of things that could be easily overlooked, however. The first is that much of problems of society affect mostly people at the bottom. People at the top live in parts of the city or suburbs that used to be relatively crime free and still are.  Their kids go to schools that used to be good and still are. Most of the people they knew were married and still are. Most of the kids grew up in stable households and still do. The changes since the 1960s really didn’t hurt them.

Another thing he pointed out was the increasing sorting. People increasingly have choices. Colleges have gotten good at choosing smart people. They meet each other and marry each other, producing families with advantages of good habits, sound incomes and whatever advantages of talent nature has provided. The opposite applies to people on the other end.

Murray illustrated the changes with the people in the room. Older people – like me – are much more likely to have grown up in “non-elite” households. We still remember living in working class or farm communities. Many of us were among the first in our families to graduate from college. The young people in the room – our kids – grew up in families with college educated parents. They have no personal memories of anything but the educated, well-off lives. Our sorting methods work too well today. Ironically, relying on merit and making opportunity widely available will end up sorting people by talent and habits, locking in advantages.

Finally, Murray made the comparison to the Roman Empire, but not the usual one of decline. He pointed out that the Roman Empire continued to grow in power and glory after it lost the old republican virtues. He is right.

The apogee of Roman power came during the time of Trajan and Hadrian, more than 150 years after the fall of the Republic and even longer since the decline of traditional Roman “virtues” or what we might call Roman “exceptionalism.” America may well remain a powerful country w/o our traditional virtues. But we may well lose our exceptional abilities for self-government and self-determination, things Murray calls the American project, which has been with us since the founding of our Republic. Murray thinks this is worth saving, but he admits that Imperial Rome in the Second Century was a more orderly, prosperous and peaceful place than it had been under the Republic. Empires can be good at running things, but they do this by dispensing with freedom.   

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Owls, Hawks & Falcons

Alex and I attended a lecture at Smithsonian about raptors.  Hawks and other raptors were in serious trouble into the 1970s, when they were being killed by hunting and poisonings of the environment.  But today all significant species have come back and are now very common throughout the U.S.  Hawks have taken care of lots of the pigeon, squirrel and rabbit problems in Washington and other big cities.  I had noticed that there were fewer pigeons around lately.

I learned a few things I didn’t know.  For example, the tufts on the heads of owls are not ears.  Owls’ ears are placed unevenly on their heads, with one lower on the head than the other. When owls move their heads in circles, what they are doing is listening differentially to identify the source and distance of objects. When owls go after prey, they are more often using their sense of hearing than sight. The speakers said that the owl can pinpoint a prey a hundred yards away by sound alone.

A few other facts – You can tell falcons from hawks by the shape of their wings.  Hawks have rounded wings, while falcon wings are pointed. Great horned owls have no sense of smell, so they are one of the only birds to regularly prey on skunks. The speaker said that great horned owls usually stink on ice as a result.  Hawks have phenomenal vision, but they kind of zoom in on prey and do not see things not in their target zone. This is why they sometimes get hit by cars as they go after something near a road.

One of the most interesting things about the lecture came from the demographics of the audience.  The room was packed with at least a hundred people.  When one of the speakers asked how many people had heard of the Epic of Gilgamesh (from ancient Mesopotamia; it mentioned falcons) dozens of hands went up.  This is not something that most people know about.  On the other hand, when the speaker asked how many people in the audience were hunters, nobody raised a hand.  I might have paid no attention, but I know so many hunters and down in the south everybody hunts.  Washington does not really represent America.   I have been hunting a couple times, but I am such a bad shot that I never got anything.  Alex went hunting rabbits with the club and achieved similar results.  We didn’t raise our hands either for Gilgamesh (which we have both read) or hunting, so I suppose the sample was not exactly fair, but still in the main it is interesting.

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Blustery Day with Intellectual Challenges

I attended a lecture this evening on Theodore Roosevelt and the Progressive movement. It was an interesting talk, but the whole thing made me feel a bit inadequate.  There were lots of smart people in the audience, such as Michael Barone and Ben Wattenberg.  They asked insightful questions, but it wasn’t just that that made me feel lower.  I have never been able to keep my experts straight. These guys can compare subtle differences between works of various people and between philosophies. I have a more mix & match mind.  It works well in many things, but I am outclassed by the big brains when it comes to straight intellectual debate.

FSI gave me a kind of an aptitude test recently. I didn’t pay much attention, but it did “reveal” that I don’t set clear boundaries, meaning my learning style is find similarities instead of differences. They spend a lot of time developing these tests, but they never really tell you what you can do about it, since they always say that all the styles are equally okay. IMO, the holistic approach works for lots of things, but it doesn’t work for the intellectual parsing I talked about above. I enjoyed the talk and I took notes.  I will use the information for something in the future, I suppose.  But I will be unable to keep it straight.

That Michael Barone is a genius. I have long read his books and watched him on TV. He seems to be able to remember the details of every political contest, down to the county level, since the founding of the Republic.  The interesting thing he brought up was the hypothetical about what would have happened if Roosevelt had not died in 1919.  He probably would have run for president in 1920 and almost assuredly would have won.  How different would history have been?  Would he have repeated the energetic presidency of his youth, or would the second act just have ruined his reputation and maybe hurt the country. Of course we will never know.

On the plus side, I had my informal first Portuguese test and I got – unofficially – 2+/3.  This means nothing to most of you reading this, but it is a decent score after six weeks of instruction for someone who has been away from a language for twenty-five years.   The assessments are on a five point scale.  Zero is when you cannot say a word in the language; five is educated native proficiency. Even many native speakers in a language cannot get a five, since it is an educated speech.  We have to get a minimum of 3 speaking and 3 reading, which is “minimum professional proficiency.” 

I would like to get to 4 both speaking and reading and I think I have a good chance, but it is hard, since the difficulty rises exponentially.  It is a lot easier to get from 1 to 2 than it is from 3 to 4 and – as I said – almost nobody gets to 5, even if you are born in the country.  Four is good.  Everybody knows what you are talking about and you don’t make any serious mistakes, but you retain a (no doubt) charming accent, think Ricardo Montalban. Language is such and important part of my job that I think it is worth the effort. I had a 3+/3+ in Polish, which served me fairly well, but I can do better than that in Portuguese. I already have some background; besides it is an easier language & State is giving me the time and instruction I need to get the job done.   Back in 1985, I went to Brazil with 3/3.  During my time there, my language improved, but I didn’t test when I came back, so I don’t know what I had.  I don’t think it was better than a 3+.  I was very fluent, but I lacked the polish that I hope to get this time around.

The pictures are from my walk around the Mall today. It was cold with a very strong wind, but I walked from State Department to the Gold’s Gym at Capitol after my Portuguese class and it was okay because the wind was from the west, i.e. at my back. I took the Metro up to the stop near AEI for the lecture this evening and so avoided the freezing wind most of the time. 

The top pictures are of the Grant Memorial near the Capitol.  In the second picture, notice the half moon above Grant’s head.  Below is the skating rink on the Mall and some portraits along the path.  I recognize Washington and Napoleon, but I don’t know the other two.

More photos are at this link. 

BTW – I am sorry that I am not writing more. Portuguese and Brazil is taking most of my intellectual energy, as I mentioned.  I watch the Brazilian news every day and read some books and magazines. After the homework is done, there is less time to write. language training is serious business, but rewarding.    

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REDD & General Scott

I attended a conference on REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation) at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace.  It was interesting, but not very much.  They talked about things I knew about already. But what I really didn’t like was the lack of diversity.  There were NGO people and officials, who disagreed about whether using international funds to preserve forests was just very good or great.  

I like the spirit of saving forests very much, but I don’t think that making international payments for conservation is a long term solution, even if we overcome the problems of measurement and corruption (which is a big if).  In the long run, we need to make a sustainable forestry system that allows for change and development. I think that the panel members understood this.  A guy from the Nature Conservancy talked about the need to integrate human needs.  

But I think they should have had the diversity of someone who had different interests, i.e. loggers, farmers etc.  I bet there would be a lot of common ground, but it would make for a more interesting discussion.   I mentioned this to one of the organizers. She seemed open to the idea, but seemed to think that such a person would not be well received by the audience.  Maybe.

I walked back down to the Metro along Massachusetts Avenue.  When I first joined the FS, I stayed at a Hotel called the General Scott, near Scott Circle.  This is a nice part of town and it was a good introduction to Washington and our American heritage to live there. The General Scott hotel is gone.  I remember the name so well because I accidentally stole one of their hangers. I suppose the statute of limitations is run out.I didn’t do it on purpose and didn’t notice the crime until much later. Anyway, I probably left one of my own hangers, but since it was more than a quarter century ago, I don’t really recall.  I know I took one of their hangers because I still have it, stamped with the hotel name, too late now to give it back, sorry.   

 I took a couple pictures near the circle. The top is General Scott’s statue at the circle.  Next is Daniel Webster. The first contact I had with Daniel Webster was when I read “the Devil & Daniel Webster” in junior HS. I chose it because it was a short book. The real Webster was more interesting.  Speaking of interesting, the next picture is a monument to Samuel Hahnemann. I didn’t know who that was, so I looked him up. He was the “father of homeopathy” and he once thought that coffee made you sick. I don’t know why he gets such a nice monument in Washington.

The last two picture are trees I like.  The yellow ones are ginkgo trees; the red one is a red oak, with its beautiful fall colors. The oak, BTW, is not near the circle. I took that yesterday.

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Sugar Cane & Ethanol

Ethanol has lots of advantages, according to what I heard during a program on biofuels at the Brazil Institute at the Wilson Center. One of the biggest advantages is that it is dispersed, both nationally and internationally. Within a country, ethanol production tends to be in rural areas. It is difficult to over centralize, since moving the feed stocks is much more expensive than moving the ethanol.  (This is a very old advantage, BTW.  In our own history, the whiskey rebellion was fueled by exactly the same consideration. It was much more effective to move whiskey made from grains than move the bulky raw materials.)  It is also dispersed internationally, unlike petroleum, which is heavily concentrated in the Middle East. Feed stocks for ethanol can be grown almost anywhere in the world, which is why people can make booze all over the world. Of course, not all feed stocks are equally good, but sugar cane, one of the best feed stocks, can be grown all over the tropics.

Sugar cane is especially well suited to Brazil. The climate is nearly perfect in many regions. Sugar cane requires lots of water during some seasons and not much later on. The sugar doesn’t form well unless the plant is stressed by drought.  This is why sugar cane does not grow well in the Amazon, where it rains throughout the year, but other areas of Brazil have very distinct wet and dry seasons. 

The sugar cane wet/dry rotation also works well in Brazil’s energy equation in another way.  Brazil is heavily dependent on hydro-power and hydro is heavily influenced by rain.  During the wet seasons, there is a lot of river flow, but not so much in the dry season.  Dry season shortfalls are filled with thermal plants, usually burning fossil fuels.  This is where sugar cane comes in again.  Besides the ethanol produced by the cane, there is also the biomass (i.e. canes).  Refiners have long used the biomass as an energy source, but this co-generation potentially produces much more energy than is needed in the refineries. Sugar cane is harvested in the dry season, which means that the fuel is available exactly when it is most needed.

Sugar cane is a six year crop, i.e. it must be replanted every six years.  They use a kind of six field rotation in Brazil.  A grower divides his land into seven sections for each of the growing seasons for the cane, plus a non-cane rotation.  So each year, one section gets the final harvest. This one is then planted with a alternate crop, usually a legume such as beans or soy.  These crops fix nitrogen and restore the soil fertility.  The non-cane rotation also serves to allow diseases of cane to die out on those fields.  After the year, cane is again planted, but a different variety in order to avoid blight.  There are more than 400 varieties of sugar cane.  

The Brazilian biofuels endeavor has meant an increase in land devoted to cane, but not really very much.  Less than 1% of Brazilian land is devoted to cane for ethanol or crops for biodiesel.   Better plant varieties and methods of growing have allowed more production.  Of course, there has been expansion onto other land.  Most of this land was degraded pasture land.  Brazil is a high intensity cane producer, but beef production has been extensive, i.e. requiring a lot of land per unit of production.  Brazil has only 1.1 head of cattle per hectare of pasture.  This could be greatly improved and since Brazil has a lot of pasture land (more than 20% of Brazil is pasture) there is significant scope for cane production w/o contributing to deforestation.

Sugar cane production in Brazil is almost entirely rain fed and Brazil has a lot of water in general.  Brazil accounts for 19% of the world’s total river discharge.  Of this, 13% of the rain actually lands on Brazil itself.  The rest comes from water flowing into the country from neighboring countries.

Sugar cane culture is being mechanized. All new plantations must be harvested mechanically and by 2014 it will no longer be legal to burn stalks, which means that all plantations will need to be harvested mechanically. Why?  It is actually very practical Sugar cane has sharp leaves, so sharp and still that they cut people working among the plants. For centuries, growers have used surface fires to singe the leaves off, which allow workers to go into the cane and harvest it. W/o fire, it is practically impossible to harvest cane by hand. Mechanical harvesting eliminates the need for surface fire. Even with the singeing fires, work in the cane fields is dirty & brutally hard. While it is always difficult to throw lots of this kind of semi-skilled labor out of work, these are not the kinds of jobs you want to preserve going into the next century.