Month: December 2009

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Freedom is Just Another Word for Nothing Much to Do

It is like the man who has been locked up for a long time.   Suddenly the door swings open and after years of dreaming about it, he is free.   But he really doesn’t know where to go or what to do.  The social media has done that to us in public affairs.   We always said that we would be on easy street if we could just reach people, if we could just overcome the filters of editors and government controls.  To a great extent we now can, but there is less than we had imagined.

A poor workman blames his tools

I am disappointed in the social media in spite or – or maybe because of – our success.   We (State, IIP etc) have succeeded in reaching out directly to millions of people through the new media but the results have been astonishingly banal.   A poor workman blames his tools.   The fault lies not in the social media tools we are using but in our own lack of imagination in using them, coupled with unrealistic expectations.   Social media is what it is.  We can use it well or poorly, but we cannot change its fundamental nature.   So what are some of the things we might try to do differently?  Or maybe, what are the misconceptions that are keeping us from doing as well as we could?   To use the 1990s B-school jargon, how can we shift our paradigms?

Our reach exceeds our grasp

Our minds still inhabit the old world of mass one-way media.   Despite all the protestations to the contrary, we still think in terms of television, where one announcer reaches millions of people and it makes a difference.   We CAN still reach millions with new media, but so can lots of other people.  The power of television was not that it could reach millions.  Its power centered on its capacity to dominate the attention of millions of people.   

The wealth of options creates a poverty of attention. That means that “reach” is not what it used to be. Those who just want to reach more people don’t understand the realities of social media. Reaching a million people is easy. Grasping them and holding their attention, that is hard.      

It is like yelling “hey” at somebody.   He looks in your direction.   If you say nothing or just say “hey” again, all you will end up doing is annoying him.   Social media is very good at saying “hey” (we tend to call it building awareness) but the follow up is often not there.

You find your keys in the last place you look, because after that you stop looking

Reaching audiences and “Building awareness” w/o follow-up is usually worse than nothing because it allows you to stop at that.   There is a good chance you can fool people with the good numbers.  It sounds very impressive to say that your message reached a million people and you may be encouraged to think that your work is done.   All you need to is repeat this success tomorrow and the next day and you are on easy street. The most devious way to hide something from someone is to make him think he found it already. Let him go happily and ignorantly on his way.   We fool ourselves when we settle for reach. 

Less is more?

Of course the opposite end of this bull crap continuum is the contention that you didn’t reach more than a couple people, but that they were really important.   This may be true, but it almost never is.   You can test it by asking for names.   If your expensive program reached only a dozen people, you better know who they are and be able to give a creditable reason why they are so important.   

I will admit it.  I have fallen back on both these subterfuges on occasion; of course well in the past.  Sometimes I have even done it on purpose.   It is possible that your boss just doesn’t understand what you are trying to do, so you do something that you know will generate a big crowd to make him happy so that he will be happy and you can get on with your important work.   Other times, you just mess up. It is easier to claim that you got the small number of key players than these were the only guys you could round up down at the train station.

Now that I am sometimes in a position to be the boss on these sorts of things, I know enough to ask the proper questions.  Sometimes I am polite enough not to, although I usually follow up with an “amusing anecdote” so they know not to try it again.  

Getting it right more important than just getting it

My disappointment with the social media has just made me more enthusiastic about getting it right. We really will need to change some of the ways we do business.   We really do have to think about a new “community manager” role for online communities.  This person has to be like a diplomat in many ways.  That means that he/she need more than technological skills or the ability to “reach out”.  He/she also need some substantive knowledge.   If you are going to participate in a science community, you better know something about science.

We also have to get more into the human-interface.  Real social media requires real social engagement.   We cannot be social media broadcasters and we have to resist attempts to expand our social media community reach beyond what we can reasonably handle.

Many Distinct Niches Better than a Big Blob

Being overly broad is also not usually desirable or successful in building a community.   You are better off working with many niche communities made up by people really interested and committed to a topic than trying to reach a big general audience.   A niche audience allows each individual to get what he/she is looking for.   As the community develops, members begin to feel a sense of belonging.  They value the community and protect it.  A community like this will usually be self policing, since individual members will have the expertise and perceive the interest to discipline bad actors and correct bad information.

Knowing your audience is important but identifying topics rather than audiences is the key to success.   Naturally topics have to be interesting to somebody but audiences will form around topics.   Identifying audiences and then trying to find topics to attract them not only nearly impossible to do, it is also borderline silly.   It means that you abdicate leadership and allow your priorities to be set by what you think you can easily sell.   Presumably we have some of our own priorities and some of them must be advocated whether they are popular or not.

Wisdom of crowds

I still haven’t figured this out and I am pretty sure I never will.  But I do understand some parts of the puzzle and in true social media fashion I will rely on the hive intelligence.  I think most of what we need to know is already known or can be found by somebody in the State Department.   We just have to find each other and go from a bunch of learning individuals to a learning organization.   Social media can help figure out social media.   It is fitting.

The gate is open wide and we can see the far horizons but none of us knows where to go.  However, all together we might pick the right direction.

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Things (don’t) Fall Apart

People are more likely to pay attention to threats of loss than they are to possible gains. That is why the news is full of stories of loss and destruction, now and even worse predicted in the future. Of course, it is also just the nature of news. Good things often evolve over a long time. Bad things are usually more dramatic. But even during our “hard times” life is good compared to other times and places.

Nostalgia is not what it used to be

Nostalgia is a great thing. Our minds get clouded by time and eventually even bad things start to look okay. Survivor bias is also at work. The things from the “good old days” that manage to survive today were often of better value in the first place.

We remember that everything was cheap in the old days, but we forget that we made a lot less money. One of the ways to equalize this is to look at how long it takes to earn the money to buy things you want. I read an article that made that comparison.

Most things get cheaper with better quality

For example, in 1958 a color TV cost 136.34 hours of work at the average wage. Today a similar TV costs only 19.08 hours. Of course, today’s television is a lot better in terms of picture and reliability. Back in 1958 nobody could have afforded to buy the kind of quality you can get now by working a little more than 19 hours.

A person living in middle class prosperity back in 1958 would be considered poor today in terms of the quality and quantity of what he could buy.

Malaria cases way down

Another piece of good news I found on the inside pages of the WSJ was that fears of global warming and disease spreading notwithstanding, malaria is declining, according to the World Health Organization.  It even looks like H1H1 is not as bad as we thought.

Predictions of dooms past seem funny today, but they scared people back in the day

I am old enough to have survived predicted ends of the world several times. We survived the nuclear Armageddon in the 1960s. In the 1970s we overcame global cooling. The population bomb didn’t destroy us in the 1980s and we didn’t notice the near complete depletion of resources that the experts told us was coming. While we didn’t quite enjoy the end of history and the collapse of communism as much as we thought in the 1990s, the predicted vast refugee crisis didn’t materialize, Y2K didn’t destroy our information society and Internet in general didn’t shut down for lack of connectivity. Oh yeah, acid rain didn’t kill all our forests and lakes. Terrorism is indeed a problem in this decade, but we seem to have adapted reasonably well and compared to the apocalyptic predictions, we feel lucky to remain alive, healthy and so well-off.

When our kids look back fifty years from now, how funny will some of the things we worry about today seem to them? I know – ours is the worst hard time. Yeah, yeah, that’s what we said back then too. They may talk about the good old days and how things were so much better for us. But like us, they will know that they have it better than their parents.

BTW – one of my favorite poems is the Second Coming by William Butler Yeats – written in 1919, when things really were a lot worse. 

THE SECOND COMING

    Turning and turning in the widening gyre
    The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
    Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
    The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
    The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
    The best lack all conviction, while the worst
    Are full of passionate intensity.

    Surely some revelation is at hand;
    Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
    The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
    When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
    Troubles my sight: a waste of desert sand;
    A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
    A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
    Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
    Wind shadows of the indignant desert birds.
    The darkness drops again but now I know
    That twenty centuries of stony sleep
    Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
    And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
    Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

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Oh Christmas Tree

Chrissy got the idea to make a kind of glittering Christmas tree with mirrors and glitter to reflect the light.  She made the glittery snowflakes herself.

The tree is a Frasier fir.  Alex picked it out at Home Depot.  I brought a tree up from the farm when we first got it, but loblolly pines don’t make good Christmas trees.  They drop the needles very fast and they are not very bushy.  They grow fast, which makes them good timber trees, but that means that they have long growth branches.  Christmas trees are usually trimmed to make them fuller.  It tried that, but it didn’t work with my trees.  It is easier just to go to Home Depot.

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Leaving Things Undone Accomplishes More

Up until this year the landscapers around our housing complex have been busy with their noisy leaf blowers and stinky mowers, this year not so much.  In fact, they more or less left the strip in back of our house alone and let the leaves pile up.  This is very good and you can see the evidence of that in the pictures.  

We got a lot of rain this season and the ground is saturated. This has always meant erosion the water runs rapidly off the roofs of the houses and down the narrow channel in back. The shadows of the houses and trees make it hard to grow grass and grass has trouble standing up to the fast water flow. (In the pictures you see the lilyturf and ivy I planted a couple years ago to at least hold the ground in back of our house. That does well in this environment, but in back of the other houses there is mostly just dirt.)  W/o the leaves on the ground, the water running off is full of silt, but the leaves both protect the ground and absorb some of the water.

Storm water is a big and growing problem in Fairfax County because of all the hard surfaces. It erodes the stream beds and messes up the Chesapeake Bay.  Sometimes our excessive commitment to tidiness exacerbates the problem.  Most homeowners are unenthusiastic about water standing near their houses and they quickly sweep up leaves.  This “virtue” is hard on the water systems.

See the utility box in the picture below. Before I put in that ground cover, there was a big rut almost a foot deep running along both sides of that thing. The plants have raised the ground level, by trapping silt. They will completely cover the ground by the end of next year.  If the whole back was covered in plants most storm water would soak in and very little would run off at all.

The lesson I take is that you are often better off letting things alone.   There have been lots of proposals to try to make the grass grow (impossible in the shade), put in drains (expensive, bad for the environment because it accelerates runoff), put in rocks (ditto) or mulch the whole thing (not bad, but mulch tends to wash away a lot easier than leaves), but the best thing to do may be almost nothing.

The best thing to do would be to put in some kind of ground cover, actually make the whole thing into a long rain garden.  (I wrote about this kind of thing before) In time, it would establish a strong root system that would both trap sediment and help water soak in. It would be a little work at first but then very low maintenance.  It took me a day to put in that in the pictures ground cover and I got it all free just by taking what Chrissy thinned out from the front of the house, but I can’t and wouldn’t be allowed to put it in back of the other sixteen houses along this way. So the next best thing to do is nothing, or maybe just resist any attempts to “fix” the problem at home owner association meetings, unless we are talking about rain gardens.  Maybe I should develop a proposal for a rain garden. I volunteered to help start a landscape committee a couple months ago, but still have no interest or authorization from the board. I suppose I should bring it up again.

So absent that, sometimes doing nothing, or at least not much is the best thing.  All I know is that I have been watching this water flow for a ten years, trying with limited success to stop the dirt from running off.  Now the lackadaisical response to the fallen leaves have done the job for me.  

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So Far, So Good on the Climate Change Negotiations

The Obama Administration is exceeding our expectations at Copenhagen. Todd Stern, our chief negotiator has adroitly thrown cold water on developing county blackmail while our delegation makes the joyous noise with environmentalist. It has been an excellent balance of realism and hype that might actually lead to a workable agreement instead of the usual crap that comes out of these big convocations. So far, so good, let’s keep it up.

Calling their bluffs

Stern has called the climate community’s bluff, as we hoped he would. No more can plaintive voiced people get away with just saying how bad we are, how terrible things might get and – with a tears in their eyes – say that it would all be just great if only the U.S. would do the right thing. Stern pointed out that 97% of the new emissions will come from developing nations. Unless they step up, nothing will work. A little tough love was what they needed and what they are getting. One of our most potent tools is the resort to higher authority. This is something you learn in negotiations 101, but most people hate to use it. It does our egos a lot of good if we can say that we are the final decision makers, but it is a very bad negotiating position. It allows you to get rolled and/or carried away by the tide of events. This is what evidently happened at Kyoto. Otherwise it is hard to explain how our negotiators agreed to such a monumentally stupid agreement.

The negotiator proposes; the Senate disposes

How does the resort to higher authority work in this case? Our negotiators know and they have let other know that no matter what kind of agreement they reach at international venues, the U.S. Senate will have something to say about it when all the dealing is done. If the agreement is too absurd, the Senate will reject it, as the unanimous Senate did with Kyoto. This is a powerful incentive for everyone to be reasonable and not allow the exhilaration of the moment overpower the longer term realities.

Good guys and bad guys

There is another negotiation tactic that it seems that the Obama administration is using. That is the one we all recognize from watching cop shows – good guy/bad guy or good cop/bad cop. It is closely related to the higher authority gambit in that President Obama gets to be the good guy while the vaguely identified opposition plays the villain role. The incentive is to give something to the good guy so as to avoid rewarding or even having to deal with the bad guy. George Bush could never have pulled this off. He would have been undercut by the U.S. environmental community and, anyway, he didn’t have the persona to pull it off. Obama can. We all hope that he can swoop in at the end and scoop up some of the marbles that we otherwise would have lost.

America holds a strong hand this time

Addressing climate change is a big job and it will cost trillions of dollars. We agree on the goal, but there are ways to do it that are more and less effective; more or less costly and more or less costly particularly to the U.S. That is what these negotiations are about. And this is something that those most loudly braying about the need to “save the planet” are often trying to obscure.U.S. CO2 emissions relative to the rest of the world have been dropping for a long time. The blame America idea is just a non-starter. America is a big part of any solution, but if others, especially developing countries, don’t step up the problem cannot be solved.

Beyond that, everybody knows that the U.S. can more easily adapt to climate change than many others. Another bluff that many developing countries are running goes something like “give us money or we will drown ourselves.” That is another bluff we can call. America has more advantages this time than ever before. We should be fair but also tough. We cannot afford free riders. As we wrote elsewhere, the U.S. is now in a better position in relation to many others. We can plausibly promise real reduction in CO2 emissions, but it is very important how we sell reductions. You don’t give things away in negotiations because you get no credit in the international community if you just do the right thing w/o making a big deal about it. Multilateral negotiations are a kind of kabuki play. You have to scream and grimace at the proper times or else nobody pays attention. You have to call attention and claim credit for good things that just happen. You know that you will be blamed for the bad things.

Climate change talks should be about … climate change

We have to insist that the climate change programs remain about climate change. They cannot be sidetracked into a general push for development aid or some kinds of transfer payments from the rich countries to the poor ones. Many national leaders and NGOs come to climate change talks with the hope of hijacking them precisely in this direction. The threat of climate change has given them a potent weapon, which they are not eager to relinquish. That is why they often reject sensible solutions such as nuclear power or want to concentrate all their efforts on the developed world industries.

Physics doesn’t distinguish among emissions

So let’s keep on task. The job is to mitigate climate change and adapt to what we cannot mitigate. This is a practical problem involving lots of physics and physical infrastructure. The Chinese Ambassador disingenuously called for soul searching when talking about climate. If he can find a place to sequester carbon there, let him search his own soul. Otherwise the world’s biggest emitter of CO2 might just want to do something practical.

You have to be willing to walk away

Finally, the most powerful tool of negotiators is the ability to walk away from a bad deal. Developed countries like the U.S. accounted for most of the historical emissions, but they emit less than half of the GHG today and this percentage will drop now and forever. If current trends continue, China alone will emit more CO2 in the next thirty years than the U.S. did since 1776. China’s emissions alone more than swamps any “historical damage” done by us.

Nevertheless, many big and future developing polluters have a big incentive to play the victims. We already hear the silly rhetoric and attempts to guilt us into doing something stupid. (The Sudanese, you recall the guys who brought us the genocide in Darfur, had the guts to ask us to remember the children. Well, we do.) We should not let the idea that we MUST make a deal stand in the way of making a good deal. If many in the developing world have their way, we will send a lot of money with few or no strings attached to countries that historically have not managed their finances well. They will talk a lot about reducing CO2, but not do very much about it. In fact, the big buck infusion will enable them to pollute even more. This deal is worse than no deal and everybody has to understand that we will walk away than accept it. Climate change is an urgent problem and we need to find solutions. But rushing to do the WRONG thing will just make the whole thing worse. It is like the dishonest salesman who wants you to sign w/o reading the agreement. He tells you that if you don’t act right now, it will be too late. The deal will disappear. It is usually better to let a deal like that disappear. But the funny thing about negations is that if they know you are willing to walk away, the other side usually gets a lot more reasonable. The ABILITY to walk away usually means you don’t have to. The world will get a more effective climate deal if the U.S. is tough and realistic. Let’s not let another Kyoto mess things up for another decade.

Below are some sources you might want to consult on the climate debate.

AEI Brookings

Economist Special Report on the Carbon Economy

Nature Conservancy Pew Climate Change Center

WSJ on Climate Debate

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Sick, Tired, Sick & Tired or Just Plain Lazy

Yesterday I did something I have never done before:  I left work early because I felt sick.   In retrospect and with the benefit of knowing how I feel today, I know it was nothing much.  I was just really tired and my body ached all over.  I now believe I just didn’t get enough sleep and a pulled muscle in my back was radiating discomfort through the rest of my body. It is better today.  I usually would have just ignored it, but I guess I succumbed to all that hysteria about the H1N1 flu, which BTW doesn’t seem as big a deal as we all feared.

Sick of sickness

I felt a little bad about bugging out yesterday and on the way to work this morning, I thought about sick leave.   I have a lot of it saved up.  In the USG, you earn four hours of sick leave every pay period (two weeks) & can carry your sick leave balance over to the next year.   I have saved more than 2300 hours, which comes to about a year and a half of work time when you count in normal holidays.   I always thought of it as a kind of disability insurance policy.   Who needs AFLAC when you have SL?   I am lucky that I just don’t get sick very often, but I also don’t allow little discomforts to keep me home.  For example, I would not normally have taken sick leave for something like yesterday. Life is full of little discomforts; most don’t matter.

The whole concept of sick leave is interesting, when you think of it.  We get annual leave (vacation) and then we get sick leave.   We are not supposed to mix them, but a lot of people do.  A significant number of people use every hour of both each year.  Sometimes I suppose they really are sick; sometimes not and sometimes I think the definition of “sick” is stretched past normal credulity.  

Sick on Mondays and Fridays

As a manager, I noticed that sickness tended to happen more often on Mondays and Fridays and some people were consistently sick whenever some sort of difficult assignment was on the horizon.  It is a tough call sometimes.   Ostensibly you have to respect that people get sick. But you are very often faced with a simple choice.  Either the person is there or not. If they are not there, they cannot work. Whether the reason is good or bad, not showing up takes away a chance to succeed.   Since success tends to build on itself, if you don’t show up a lot you will have a lot more trouble succeeding.  

All success depends first on just showing up

Is that fair?  The chronically absent tend to think not, but what can you do?   I did an informal poll at my table during one my senior training last year.  It is hard to get into the SFS, so getting there is a measure of success. There were six people at my table and we all had thousands of hours of unused sick leave.   It was not a statistically valid sample but I think it makes sense.   Of course the causality is unclear. Do successful people get sick less often?  Are they sick less often because they are successful?  Do they just not abuse sick leave as much?   Correlation is not causality, but you can learn lessons from it nevertheless. 

I earn more than two weeks of sick leave a year, which I don’t use, so that means that I work two weeks more than I would if I took off.  In the course of my career, I have worked about a year and a half longer than someone who took off all the sick days allowed.  It stands to reason that additional time on task will probably yield better results.

I don’t believe that you should come to work when you have some contagious sickness and I don’t.  But that just doesn’t account for very much time. My general rule is to assume I am doing something I want to do, a vacation.  Would I let whatever I am feeling stop me from doing that?  If the answer is no, I should also go to work.

My parents taught me good habits. I don’t remember my father EVER taking a sick day. I suppose he did, but not often enough that you would notice. When I said I was sick he would tell me some stories about the depression or the war. He also told a story about his cousin, Eddy Wysoki, who evidently drank a whole bottle of rubbing alcohol. That made him really sick. I guess ordinary sickness wasn’t invented yet back then. My mother let me stay home from school any time I claimed I was sick.  The catch was that I had to stay in my room and rest on the assumption that if I was sick enough to stay home, I was too sick to play.  I still recall an instance when I was legitimately sick in the morning, but recovered.  Nevertheless, I couldn’t play with my friends outside after school. I thought it was unjust, but it was a lesson I obviously still remember.

How to handle too much sick leave

The problem with accumulating sick leave is that it goes to waste when you leave the government service.  That is why I was happy to hear that the Congress has decided to tack ½ of the total sick leave hours onto our time in work for retirement purposes. That means that I will have an extra six months of credible Federal Service when I retire.  If you retire after 2014, you will get the whole time credited.  It makes sense, since as I wrote above I did indeed work that extra year. The USG was having some trouble with absenteeism.  

There is the incentive to just be sick.  I mean, who doesn’t feel sleepy in the morning? Could it be sickness?  Maybe we better sleep a little more to make sure.   Feeling a little winded after climbing some stairs?  Maybe better go home and rest.  When you have a year’s worth of sick leave that you will just forfeit and you plan to work for less than a year, such things begin to make sense.

I remembered a stanza from the Book of the Tao. It really doesn’t make much sense, but it kind of applies here.

Tao Te Ching – Lao Tzu – chapter 71

Knowing ignorance is strength.
Ignoring knowledge is sickness.

If one is sick of sickness, then one is not sick.
The sage is not sick because he is sick of sickness.
Therefore he is not sick.

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Negotiation 101 and Climate Change

“When you say you agree to a thing in principle you mean that you have not the slightest intention of carrying it out in practice.”* I have limited confidence in the efficacy of big global agreements, but I understand the usefulness of participating and we hope our team will be very forthcoming and aggressive in the COP 15 climate talks.

Forget Kyoto

The Clinton Administration never had any intention of implementing Kyoto. The Senate rejected it 95-0 before even being asked to ratify it. This was a unanimously bipartisan rejection of the climate treaty.  Kyoto was dead on arrival, as the saying goes and it  was indeed a seriously flawed agreement but Clinton was clever. He understood the dynamics of the public relations around climate change.  Nobody really intended to carry out the terms of the treaty beyond the extent to which it was convenient. Most of the climate lobby was perfectly content if the U.S. went along rhetorically.  Most of the major players were going along with the mendacious program.   Bush didn’t understand how to play that deceptive game well enough and openly rejected the agreement  & the U.S. got eight years of international crap as a result.

Take credit for what will happen anyway

Kyoto was meaningless. Developing countries got a free ride on the misplaced guilt of the more productive and hence more energy consuming nations (energy consumption is closely related to output). The former Soviet Empire was in the process of shutting down the horribly polluting – and without strong state protection – unprofitable industries built up during the benighted communist era.  Countries in both these camps knew that nothing much would be asked of them and they might even be able to make a little money selling carbon they would not have produced anyway. The Russians were in the now even more enviable position of having been so horribly dirty and inefficient that any approach to normal would be rewarded with unearned credits and cash.


BTW – Russian carbon credits are one of the reasons ostensible carbon reductions in Europe were so cheap and ineffective.The Russians are now lining up to milk what they can out of Copenhagen.


Our European friends also came to the game with a few aces up their sleeves and a lot reductions already cooked into the pie when they signed on to Kyoto. In the British Midlands, they were in the process of converting from dirty coal to much cleaner and less carbon intensive natural gas. The Germans had recently acquired the outdated industry of communist-East Germany.  They were shutting down these inefficient and very polluting industries anyway.  It was sort of like a cash for clunker industries program. 

The fall of communism in Eastern Europe was a significant ecological benefit all around. Just bringing industries up to non-communist standards resulted in a big reduction of all sorts of pollution. Beyond all that, they understood that Europe’s generally slower rate of economic growth would slow demand for new uses of carbon.

The U.S., in contrast, didn’t have any big shutdowns on the way and our economy was growing about twice as fast as those in continental Europe which would mean a growing need for energy. 

Progress is on the way; revel in it and don’t sell it cheap

We are now in a better position in relation to many others.   We can plausibly promise real reduction in CO2 emissions, but it is very important how we sell reductions.  You don’t give things away in negotiations because you get no credit in the international community if you just do the right thing w/o making a big deal about it.  Multilateral negotiations are a kind of kabuki play.  You have to scream and grimace at the proper times or else nobody pays attention. You have to call attention and claim credit for good things that just happen.  You know that you will be blamed for the bad things. 

The free market is remarkably adaptive. When the price of gas rose in 2006, Americans used less energy and emissions of CO2 dropped. This is the only time this happened in a major country during a time of robust economic growth. Did we get any credit?  Did anybody even notice?  I had to look hard to find it in the media.  WITHOUT the hyperbolic rhetoric you don’t even get credit for what you REALLY do. WITH rhetoric you can even get credit for things that just happen even if you do nothing.  It takes a little dose of hypocrisy to make the world go around.

Now we’re cooking with gas

Source


It gets better.  We will soon be able to reduce carbon emissions w/o working up too much of a sweat. Technological advances in only the last few years have made available vast amounts of natural gas within the U.S. Our recoverable reserves have gone up by 39% in the last two years alone and gas is getting very cheap. As the economics of gas improve, we will switch from coal and oil, which emit much more CO2, to gas in many situations. This will reduce our emissions.

Natural gas is also abundant in areas of the U.S. much in need of jobs and investments.

There is an even better good news story. Last year the U.S. displaced Germany as the world’s largest producer of wind energy. Wind is still no big deal as a % of energy consumption, but the trend is continuing and abundant cheap natural gas can play a role. Wind is unreliable. You have to have a back up capacity. Gas is perfect for this. Unlike a coal plant, a gas generator can be easily turned on and off. On windy days, we would get electricity from wind. When the wind wasn’t blowing, gas would fire up to fill the demand.

Other alternatives plus better quality nuclear power is also coming on line. Match this with the generally slower economic growth we expect to suffer during the next couple of years (there is a silver lining to every black cloud) and you see that U.S. emission growth will slow and we may even have some actual drops. If you look at the chart nearby, you will see that the trend started down in 2006. We expect another huge drop of 5% in 2009.  Notice from the chart that our emissions were a bit lower in 2008 than they were in 2000, w/o the benefit of Kyoto, BTW.

That means we can promise AND the United States can deliver. Delivering is important, but it is the promising that is the key to UN success. You need a lot of sound and fury in the international climate game. If we just deliver, we get no credit (cf. carbon reduction under GW Bush).  In the international negotiating arena, especially international public opinion, what you say and how loudly & passionately you say it is at least as important as what you do.

We don’t have to take it anymore

The U.S. also needs to be in a stronger “moral” position to resist unreasonable demands by less developed countries. In fact, we can turn the tables on them. They always said, or at least implied that they were waiting for us, that if we (the U.S.) reduce our emissions they would do likewise.  We are now holding the cards we need to call their bluff. We doubt  most others will actually come through, but it will at least take some of the wind out of their sails when they make unreasonable demands on us. With our emissions dropping and those from places like China (the world’s largest CO2 emitter since 2006) and other developing countries on the rise, we can throw some of the stink in the other direction for a change.

The U.S. will be a leader in the effective use to climate change technologies

This is potentially a real game changer. With President Obama’s smooth rhetoric and proven ability to promise “change we can believe in” hitched to the real potential of the American market to take advantage of favorable energy trends and the unexpected bonanza of natural gas in the short term, we can cram a sock in the anti-American rhetoric on this topic. Yes we can.

Go boldly; no need to apologize

So let’s play hardball by “playing nice.” No need to apologize or send too much money to contribute to kleopocracies in developing some countries who use the poverty of their people and bad weather as bargaining chips. Instead, shift our weight and do a little international style jujitsu. We have little to lose, since we are on track to succeed anyway in reducing our emissions relative to the rest of the world, if we use the cheap natural gas we have found and ride the wave of innovation already coming our way.  But none of it will count unless we make a big deal of promising.  Posturing, promises & procrastination, that is how they roll at these kinds of international conferences. The rules of the game do not require and do not always even encourage actual success anyway, but we can both talk and do in this case.  

Let’s do it and let’s also be seen to be doing it.  It will benefit neither the environment nor us to allow another Kyoto to be hung around our necks.  But with the proper nudge, maybe something can actually get done … even really about the environment maybe.

* The saying is attributed to Otto Von Bismarck

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False Economy

We will be spending less on TARP than we thought.   It is estimated that TARP will end up costing the taxpayers $200 billion less than was first thought, as financial institutions have recovered faster than anticipated and are paying the money back faster.    TARP turned out to be a sound investment.  Let’s keep it that way by not throwing away the dividends we didn’t really get.

Unfortunately many in our great nation have fallen for a fallacy about money and they are being encouraged in their error by dishonest politicians trying to expand the dependency of people on government largess.  

Trick accounting bankrupts people; don’t let government do it

The fallacy involved is thinking that money you saved by not spending it is necessarily money you have in hand.   It is a common fallacy and is a contributing factor to making individuals and families poor.  It is the man who buys a car he cannot afford because he got a good deal.   Instead of understanding that he to borrow $30,000, instead he counts that he has “saved” $10,000 because it “would have cost” more.   His initial error is compounded when – flush with his $10,000 “windfall savings” – he continues to spend money he doesn’t have. 

 This kind of systematic error is part of prospect theory and behavioral economics. Cass Sunstein , President Obama’s regulation advisor, has written an excellent book on these nudges.  There is a lot of thinking going on about this.  One would hope that we will not be so easily fooled this time.

C&J learned this lesson when as a young couple they planned a vacation they couldn’t afford.  We were smart enough to understand it was too much money, but then fell into the phantom money saved trap by going on a cheaper vacation that we still couldn’t afford, secure in the false knowledge that we were being virtuous by saving money.  

A penny saved is not a penny earned if you just blow it

It is even worse with borrowed money and since we are running the biggest deficits in human history, ALL the money we are talking about is borrowed money.    Saving $200 billion just means we have to borrow $200 billion less.  It doesn’t mean we have found $200 billion to spend.

We even have heard some really stupid calls to give the money “back” to the people.   What does this even mean?    The government would borrow the money.   Isn’t this how we got into the financial mess in the first place?  Too many people were borrowing money and giving to themselves w/o remembering or w/o caring that borrowed money is not free money.

Let’s not let get fooled again

Maybe $200 billion doesn’t sound like much when you already have a $1.4 TRILLION deficit, but it is real money and it is not FOUND money.  Politicians may indeed decide to BORROW and spend more, but let’s not be deceived about what they are doing or let them bribe us with our own money.  

A politician who uses phrases like “TARP funds have been freed up” or “we can spend the $200 billion we ‘saved’” is lying to us and using an easily identified judgment flaw to try to trick us.  Surely we are smarter than that.   Didn’t the last couple years teach us anything about living on the credit card?

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Self-Help for the Autodidact

I started listening to audio-books back in 1985. My audio-book consumption started about the time the format became widely useful. I moved from cassettes through CDs and to I-pods and listened to thousands of books I would not have read. Audio-books make long drives productive and often even enjoyable.  

There are advantages and disadvantages to any medium. A big disadvantage to the audio format is that it is hard to go back and forth, so if you miss something it tends to stay missed.  You cannot really study, as you can with a book. Audio also reinforces or enables one of my intellectual weaknesses.  I have a decent memory for data but not for sources.  I tend to mix knowledge promiscuously.   It is especially bad on I-pods.  I sometimes just launch a book w/o even listening to the title or author.  I could never write a research book because I could never footnote.   

On the other hand, I tend to listen to more parts of a book.   With a standard book I often skim through or skip parts I don’t like.  I don’t bother doing that with an audio-book.   Sometimes I buy the audio version of a book I have read or buy the book that goes with an audio version.  That gives the best of both worlds, but it is only worth doing for something really worth knowing.

One of the books that influenced me the most was “The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People.”I know some people are sensitive about admitting the read self-help books.Not me.I needed the help and that was a good book for it.All of it is common sense but not commonly known or followed.I read the book when it first came out in 1989 and then I got the audio version.I don’t think it would have made such an impression on my w/o the audio version.

For a couple of years I was a regular customer of Blackstone Audio Books.  They were unabridged rental books.  I drove around Southern Poland listening to the books.  I did a series of lectures in Bielsko, which was around a two hour drive from Krakow.  I made the drive once a week. I remember listening to an audio-book call “Novus Ordo Seclorum” about the Constitutional debates.  James Madison & Alexander Hamilton were prominently featured. It was funny that when I went to visit James Madison’s house I kept on having memories of Poland.  I also thought of driving in Poland while listening to another audio-book “Hamilton” by Ron Chernov.  These things happened ten years after.  My memory was cross referencing.

Lately I have been buying courses from “the Teaching Company.”  They are college lectures, each about 45 minutes long.   This is ideal for the Metro trip.  But you don’t even have to buy lectures sometimes.  Lots of universities are putting courses on line for free.  I just downloaded Donald Kagan’s history of ancient Greece.   It is mostly review, so I can just let it play as I walk along noisy streets.  The only problem with the free college lectures is that they tend to be actual live lectures.  They are not delivered with the same alacrity of a narrator concentrating on making a recording.

The narrator style and voice make a big difference. There are some narrators I recognize. For example, I listened to a couple of books by Simon Winchester.  He writes a kind of science-based history. I liked “Krakatoa” so I got another of his books about the San Francisco earthquake of 1905.  I was pleased to have the same narrator.  They guy had a nice British accent and good voice quality.  I had a less happy experience with Thomas Cahill.  Actually it was good three out of four times.  He had some excellent books, such as “How the Irish Saved Civilization,” “Desire of the Everlasting Hills” (re early Christianity) Sailing the Wine Dark Seas” (re ancient Greeks) and “Gift of the Jews.”  The last of the group had a female narrator.   Her pitch was wrong.   It was very hard to hear and understand her with traffic or metro noise in the background.  Narrators need lower and stronger voices.   The problem was that “Gift of the Jews” was a good book, better than “Sailing the Wine Dark Seas,” but the narrator got in the way.

An unwelcome development from my point of view is the increase in video. You cannot use video while driving and it generally requires full attention, which I often do not want to give. Many of the courses from the Teaching Company are available only in video format. 

Audio-books have given me the equivalent of separate college educations.  I am sure I spent more total time listening to audio-books than I spent in college and I bet I have spent more money on them over the years.  It was worth it.

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Forestry Investment

This is Virginia.   We usually don’t get snow this early in the year, but this has been a cool and wet year and maybe winter will come early.  The pictures are taken from our back and front doors.   The snow is falling on some trees that still have not finished shedding their leaves.

Confirmation Bias?

Forbes Magazine has a good article about forestry as an investment called Buying Woodlands for Fun and Profit.  I cannot believe how lucky I was to get into forestry and I keep on getting confirmation of that. I admit that I went into it backwards.  I have always loved trees and wanted to have something to do with forestry. Since we are not rich enough to own such a thing as a luxury, I had to figure out a way to make it an investment, and I think I succeeded.

I sometimes worry that I am victim of confirmation bias, i.e. I notice the information that confirms what I already believe and just overlook or ignore contrary arguments.  I suppose the downsides are the large initial investments & long term commitment.   It also helps to know something about trees.  I got good deals on both my forest parcels. It is not only luck.  I looked at dozens of properties and I could envision what the land would look like in a few years.   This is now the fifth year we have owned the first piece of land.  It is developing about as I anticipated, only a little better.  

Everybody has to save for retirement, especially these days.  Forestry is a good option. 

Given the ways the deficit is shooting faster than it has since World War II, I don’t think anybody can count on Social Security and other investments will be devalued by the inflation that will have to come in the wake of our enormous spending binge, not to mention paying for health care and the raids on the trust funds.  Forestry is a tangible asset. It will rise with inflation. But it is much more than an ordinary investment. 

It is just a joy to walk across MY land and I believe that I am doing something that has lasting value. I just don’t get that same feeling from mutual funds in an IRA.

The joy of forest ownership

Owning a forest has changed my thinking on forestry and changed my life. I understand a lot more about the moral imperative to make forestry work.  It is much more work and better for the world to grow and sustainably harvest trees than it is to set up a “sanctuary” or “preserve.” I feel a little like I am swimming against the tide of environmental perceptions.  And when I think back to how I used to think, I understand the misconception. I just have to make it my business to explain how it really is.

Read the article if you are interested in forestry or owning a forest.  If not, you probably have not gotten this far down the post anyway.   It is not something everybody wants or can do, but it is easier than most people think. You just have to really want to do it. It requires a commitment and you have to recognize the terms. You won’t get your money back quickly and your fortunes are controlled by the rhythms of nature. You have to think of it as a long-term retirement asset, not a quick turnaround investment. It literally grows slowly over time.  But it is a great thing if you can wait for it.

I understand that the chances are small that I will live long enough to make the final harvest, but that is okay.  We all plant trees for the next generation as the last generation did for us.  Life is one long chain letter.