Last gasp effort to save the environment

As Congress is trying to pass its watered-down Climate-Change bill, I pass on to you the innovative suggestions coming out of Britain.  I’m sure they are revolutionary:

• The Church of England is urging Christians to give up using their dishwashers for Lent
• Manchester City Council has suggested that a local crematorium uses the heat it generates to power its boiler
• Marks and Spencer, a hugely popular main street department store chain, has launched a range of school uniforms made out of old plastic bottles.

Somehow I’m not sure these are the kind of revolutionary ideas that are going to save our planet.

On the other hand, mabe if we all started to make our clothes out of old plastic…

Job qualifications

In politics, stupidity is not a handicap.

Napolean Bonaparte 1769 -1821

Is it cynical to say that some things never seem to change?

A disadvantage of having blue eyes

Did you ever notice that blue-eyed people tend to be more shy than brown-eyed people?  I never did, but now that I think about it, I’m not surprised.

Not just because I have blue eyes and am uneasy in situations where I have to make small talk.  I do know a lot of blue-eyed people who in one way or other fit this category too.

A recent paper by two economists at the University of Oslo found that 30% of preschool boys with blue eyes were “socially wary,” compared to only 3% of those with brown, green, or grey eyes.

And when blue-eyed children get a little older, they are more apt to use alcohol and binge drinking as a coping strategy in the face of the anxiety of social situations.

I guess I should be glad that alcohol makes my joints so sore that I am rarely tempted to deal with my anxiety by self-medicating with alcohol.  The price is just too high the next day.

Not as dumb as we might look

We were in the bank yesterday where Peter had to enter his password into the computer in order to confirm a transaction.  He didn’t have his reading glasses with him and it looked as if achieving this was a new and challenging experience for someone barely acquainted with this modern world of computing.

To his credit, the bank clerk did not adopt that annoyingly patronizing patience which I saw so often in the north of England toward anyone old enough to have grey hair.

After we left the bank, though, Peter remarked that the frailties of old age – like deteriorating eyesight or hearing – often make one look less intelligent than one is.

Which is true.  I’m not complaining – we get a great deal less of it in Cambridge because you can never be sure if you are talking to a Nobel prize winner or some other august member of Cambridge University.  So most of us over the age of fifty are given the benefit of the doubt.

But it did make me reflect on what it would be like to be young and disabled and to be kindly disregarded as not very bright because abled people misinterpret and think you look as if you aren’t.

Turning cream into butter

Last week I have decided to try to answer six questions in relation to climate change.  In an outburst of irrationality, I decided to start with the last question first:   How urgent is the problem of global warming?  what will happen if we do not change the way we are living?

I’m starting with this question because I think that right from the beginning we ought to face the reality that not all scientists are equally convinced of the urgency of doing something about global warming.  And nobody knows for sure how fast and how drastic climate changes might be.

There is a possibility that the majority of scientists might be wrong, and global warming might either not be happening or might not be caused principally by human activity.   So why not wait and see instead of going through the tremendous expense and upheaval of trying to reduce the emission of green house gases?  After all, the credit crunch has just shown us that the majority of scientists can be wrong.  So how do we know that scientists aren’t wrong about climate change?

Up to a point we don’t know.  But let us suppose, for a moment, that we do not have any evidence of pollution, water and food shortages, and species extinctions that do indeed seem to be related to our human activities.  Let us suppose that all we have are the threats that these things might happen.

What if the majority of scientists are wrong?  If we haven’t changed, life will continue to change incrementally just as it always has.  No great environmental catastrophe will occur.

But what if the scientists are right and we haven’t changed the way we generate and use energy?  Doing nothing is going to be catastrophic.

Myself, I think this is good enough reason to take pretty drastic action.

But for those who think that we can wait a little longer before we make up our minds, there is the problem of tipping points.

Tipping points are like the straw that breaks the camel’s back.  It looks as if nothing much is happening as small changes are made.  And then quite suddenly, the entire situation is dramatically transformed.  If you whip cream too long, it does not gradually become butter:  it happens quite suddenly.

Even worse, the processes are frequently irreversible, or reversible only with great effort.  A hard-boiled egg can’t be made soft again by taking it out of the boiling water and putting it back into the refrigerator.  In fact, it can’t be made soft again by any process that I have ever heard about.  Similarly, have you ever tried to turn butter back into cream? It is possible to approximate something like cream by mixing milk and butter, but it’s far more successful not to turn the cream into butter in the first place.

If our climate warms sufficiently to melt earth’s permanent snow and ice, it will be like that.  The snow reflects a great deal of sunlight and helps keep Earth cool.  Without it, Earth will get warmer and warmer, and we won’t be able to put the snow back.

Destroying an ecosystem is a lot easier than trying to restore it.

So all in all, I’m inclined to think that global warming is as urgent as most scientists think it is, but I realize they and I might be wrong.  But I don’t think we can take the risk of assuming that they are wrong.  Because if they aren’t, we won’t be able to get the toothpaste back in the tube when we have the conclusive proof.

Joy of the unfinished

Sometimes, like today, I seem to live as if I believe I am responsible for solving all the world’s problems.  There is Iran, and global warming, the world’s economy and torture, terrorism, health care, child abuse, and almost all of Africa.  Not to mention, of course, doing the laundry and brushing my teeth on most days.

So some days it’s time to stop and remember that the fate of the entire world does not rest upon my shoulders.  Which should be a significant relief for all.

Celebrating the Process

In the midst of the whirling day,

in the hectic rush to be doing,

in the frantic pace of life,

pause here for a moment.

Catch your breath

Relax your grip

Loosen your grip on life.

Consider that our lives are always unfinished business;

Imagine that the picture of our being is never complete;

Allow your life to be a work in process.

Do not hurry to mold the masterpiece;

Do not rush to finish the picture;

Do not be impatient to complete the drawing;

From beckoning birth to dawning death we are in process.

And always there is more to be done.

Do not let the incompleteness weigh on your spirit;

Do not despair that imperfection marks your every day;

Do not fear that we are still in the making.

Let us instead be grateful that the world is still to be created;

Let us give thanks that we can be more than we are;

Let us celebrate the power of the incomplete;

For life is always unfinished business.

Richard Gilbert

Waylaid in Iran

I have been reading Iran analyses and Twitter postings - I guess they are called tweets – out of Iran for several hours a day for four days now.   I haven’t been as distracted by events beyond my control since I was reading every poll being published prior to the US presidential election last November.

Given Iran’s pivotal role in the Middle East and even beyond, however the current crisis there plays out might be just as significant for the future of the world as the US election.

I don’t know what is happening in the States, but here in Britain, the main news channels are all referring to events in Iran without providing much on-the-ground information because most of their reporters have been thrown out of the country.  Which is why I’ve turned to Twitter.

Thousands of bits of information are coming out through Twitter and Facebook, and they are fascinating.  The problem, of course, is that they are unverifiable, but there is no question that some of them reflect the reality of what is happening on the ground.

I haven’t any more of an idea than anyone else how this is going to end.  The “supreme leader” is trying to create a Tienanmen Square ending.   Mousavi and the opposition are looking for something closer to the Velvet Revolution.

But in case you missed it, Twitter says that one senior Ayatollah, when asked why 141% of the population of a district had been counted as having voted in the election, said it was “because the weather was so good.”

Another young girl was reported killed today, and reports say that perhaps as many as 300 people have already died.  Meanwhile, the police have been told that if any one of them refuses to fire at “terrorist demonstrators” when ordered to do so, they will themselves be shot immediately.

The Guidance Council announced that despite the fact that over 50 cities registered more votes than voters that no fraud was discovered and confirmed the original election results.

Another Twitter says that the general strike this morning was a significant success, closing markets and shops throughout the country.   This afternoon the opposition was urged to go out into the streets without green arm bands but with their entire family, including children.  If they were stopped by the police, everyone was to say that they were going shopping.  But nobody was to buy anything.

The goal is to bring Iran to a standstill.

I don’t know what happened.  Coward that I am, I turned on the television to watch tennis at Wimbledon instead.

US healthcare: the surprise explosion

Until perhaps an hour ago, I had assumed that the case for setting up a system of universal health insurance in the United States was primarily a moral one:  47 million men, women, and children in America – almost one out of every six people – have no health insurance whatsoever.  This is a scandal.

I have now, however, just read some statistics about health insurance in the US that shocked me, and shaken some assumptions I thought were beyond question.  For instance:

- The US spends $8100 per person each year on health care.  France spends  40% less than this but has significantly higher cancer and cardiac survival rates, and longer average life expectancies.  There are similar figures for Switzerland and Japan.

So, contrary to what I thought, the US does not have the best health care in the world.  It just spends a lot more money.

- Worse still, Medicare and Medicaid, which cover only 30% of the population, are scheduled to lead to deficits of trillions of dollars within a decade. If their course of spending isn’t changed, these deficits will dwarf the 1.8 trillion credit-crunch deficit.  But the credit-crunch is a one-off problem:  the needs for healthcare are endemic and enduring year after year.

- One of the major contributors to bankruptcies of the American motor companie  has been the cost of health insurance American companies provide their employees.  In general, American-made products are often uncompetitive not because of the higher wages paid to their workers but because the healthcare of employees in other countries is covered by government-sponsored insurance, not by the company.

In addition, when health insurance is provided by the employer, it is not only expensive for the company, it limits  employees’ ability to move to new jobs.  This mobility has been one of the great drivers of the US economy almost since we first started to drive our wagons west.

- But the greatest surprise was the discovery that the increased spending power of the American consumer between 1966 and 2008 was consumed entirely by increased health insurance costs.  Entirely!

So the current US system does not provide better health care than a public-private provision like the French system, it is helping to make US companies uncompetitive, and is sapping the resources of consumers.

So it seems to me to be seriously worrisome that the lobbies of doctors, hospitals and health insurance companies might persuade Congress that Obama’s proposed healthcare reforms will destroy America’s world-beating system we have today.  It sounds more like a system beating America.

They say that if  Obama can get universal healthcare legislation passed, his place in history will be assured.   I can see why.  I had no idea how critical to America’s future well-being it is.

Solstice

Today is the longest day of the year.  It is usually a day of rejoicing for sun-lovers, but somehow today had more hours in it than I could cope with.

The main reason is Twitter.  Who would have guessed even a month ago it would replace the BBC and CNN as the major provider of the most important international events of the week?

I am not counting the days to the shortest day of the year in December. But I do need an early night tonight.

Twitter redeemed

Until now I have dismissed Facebook and Twitter as a bridge too far for old bones like mine.  And to confess the truth, I thought they were mostly for superficial exchanges for which I thought myself too mature.

I’ve now spent the last hour reading Twitter and Facebook communications coming out of Iran.

What more can I say?

Except to wonder if I would have had the courage to go out onto the streets of Tehran today.