Environment

The Culture of Death & the Green Revolution

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My daughter is furious at  her geography text; her teacher, she tells us, is ok and  more balanced.   The book, however, finds much wrong with globalization (and little good) and even more wrong (and less good) with the green revolution.   Although she has a  quiet strength and has always been concerned with ethics,  she has not been impassioned in her teen years as were her sisters.   Within the last year, however, she has developed enthusiasms for bands few have heard, for certain styles, and for the free market.   This is not because she reads (or cares much about) the blog on which her mother writes but because of a charismatic economics teacher (she took his enthusiasm with some salt, but came to believe he was generally right it fit with her worldview  and  her belief in self reliance).   Lately, she’s  bought  an appropriate t-shirt, since his were the first books she  seemed to really like.   Her uncle  pioneered no-till practices and Borlaug’s influence (lightly) touches our community.    She was not unaware  both globalization and the green revolution were complicated and some effects weren’t positive.    But she also assumed that  over all,  life wasn’t a bad result.  

 

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The Return of Commercial Sail?

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In a post on Ships and the Global Economy, I mentioned a sail-assist technology which has been develope by a German company. Operating something like a kite, the SkySails system is said to be capable of lowering vessel fuel costs by 10-35%.

Comes now Compagnie de Transport Maritime à la Voile which has entered the cargo transportation business with a pure-sail approach. The 106-year-old Kathleen & May will be running wine from Bordeaux to Dublin. CMTV has chartered several additional sailing ships and will be using them to ship products such as coffee and jam. The company also intends to have new vessels built to its specifications.

Here’s CMTV’s website. Note that shippers get a “logo sticker” that they can attach to their products, certifying that “goods are transferred to consumers in a clean and socially responsible way that contributes to sustainable development, without neglecting the requirement to exchange necessary goods between people.”

I doubt if pure sail will ever recapture a significant portion of the world ocean transportation industry, but it may well thrive in some niche markets, serving people who want to buy products which are defined as “green” or “sustainable” and who may also enjoy the association with the romance of sail.

Sail-assist technologies for powered vessels, on the other hand, may have a significant role to play, particularly if oil prices continue to climb and if environmental restrictions mandate the replacement of bunker fuel with the more-expensive distillates.

Here’s a report on the test on the SkySails system on the multipurpose cargo ship Michael A. Note the interesting comparison of the tractive force from the sail with the thrust from an Airbus A318 turbine engine.

CMTV item via Checks with Chart.

Just Unbelievable

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Edward Markey, a Democratic U.S. Congressman, told a group of high school students that “climate change” was responsible for the famine in Somalia and hence for the 1993 “Black Hawk down” battle between American troops and Somali rebels. He also told the students, who were from the Gulf states, that hurricane Katrina had been caused by global warming.

As if there hadn’t been famines, wars, and massacres..and hurricanes…for thousands of years.

Markey’s comments seem to me to be more than a little unhinged. Neptunus Lex:

To call this sort of thinking “muddled” is to do disservice leftmost tail of the intellectual bell curve. “Fantastic” might be a better description. As in “magical”.

Unfortunately, this quality of thought is pretty common on the Democratic side of the Congressional aisle. If these people were businesspeople, and applied this kind of thinking to running their businesses, they would quickly go broke. If they were tribal leaders, their tribes would wind up dying of famine or killed/enslaved by enemies. If they were ship captains, they’d run aground or be sunk by typhoons.

Pretty scary to think how much influence they have on our collective future.

Update: Corrected Markey’s title–thanks, BobC.

Sustainability of Progressive Politics

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What is sustainability? It seems to be a term that has been loaded with additional baggage since the Progressives have reappropriated the term for their own use. It seems to be a word used to describe the longevity of a given system, usually in an ecological context. Yet, as with many ideological terms of the left, it manages to translate itself into virtually every facet of human life. For example, sustainability encompasses what kind of house you live in, the food you eat, the types of vacations you go on, the politicians you elect, your choice to have children (or not), the types of investments you make, and many other aspects. But what is sustainability with regard to politics? (I am not speaking of sustainability policy–I’m speaking of the longevity associated with political constituencies.)

Victor Hanson wrote at his Works and Days blog about the sustainability of San Fransisco–no, not the ecological sustainability, but rather the sustainability of the (strongly-Democratic) human population:

I spent some time speaking in San Francisco recently… There are smartly dressed yuppies, wealthy gays, and chic business people everywhere downtown, along with affluent tourists, all juxtaposed with hordes of street people and a legion of young service workers at Starbucks, restaurants, etc. What is missing are school children, middle class couples with strollers, and any sense the city has a vibrant foundation of working-class, successful families of all races and backgrounds. For all its veneer of liberalism, it seems a static city of winners and losers, victory defined perhaps by getting into a spruced up Victorian versus renting in a bad district, getting paid a lot to manage something, versus very little to serve something. All in all, I got a strange creepy feeling that whatever was going on, it was unsustainablesort of like an encapsulated Europe within an American city. The city seems to exist on tourism, and people who daily come into the city to provide a service, get paidand leave….
 
I remember SF in the late 1950s and early 1960s as a kid visiting with his parents. A much different place altogether of affordable homes, vibrant docks, lots of construction—and children everywhere.

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