Copenhagen Wins & Losses, Iran Muslim Cross-dress Protest, Myhrvold Alt Global Warming Fix?
Stafford Williamson
December 22, 2009
WAS Copenhagen COP15 a FAILURE?
"Environmentalists" of practically every stripe are licking their wounds on their way home from the Danish disappointment. There is little question that anyone who had pinned any hopes at all on the outcome of this particular one of the ongoing process of UN sponsored Climate Conferences, came away disappointed. With the possible exception of President Obama and his negotiating team. But let´s not jump to conclusions about that assessment just yet.
COP15 had been over-hyped as the gateway to worldwide salvation from the climate and energy conundrum we are in. The US is just not ready to make a significant commitment at this time, partly just because President Obama and his administration have not had time to become entrenched in their positions in the various branches of government, nor to secure sufficient arm-twisting skills in the Congress to get things done that they know must be done to unwind some of the damage accruing from the many years of Republican administrations. I do expect some fairly major international agreement next year, but Obama´s Environmental Protection Agency has just declared carbon dioxide a "health issue" to get some control of auto emissions and some control over coal-fired electric generation facilities, so they need some time to flex those muscles and learn how much control they can exert before they get overwhelming opposition. I think they (the White House) want to make some significant commitments and they want to get their commitments ratified through Congress when they do, but that at this moment they could only make such weak promises as to damage their ability to do more next year.
If you feel as I do, I believe we are certainly correct that somehow the world has not gotten the needed sense of urgency in moving forward. But I think it was months ago that President Obama and his team decided that they were not going to be in a position to get the kind of agreement that he could push, cajole, pull, or lead through both houses of Congress in the coming months, and that getting the Capt and Trade legislation (weak though it might be to start with) in place before making bigger promises to the world. We may not be happy with the most recent outcome, but it does lay the groundwork for a more substantial agreement in coming months, and there is nothing to prevent progress at home between now and then.
Iranian Dissidents Cross-dressing Protests
After giving a "firey" speech urging fellow students at Amir Tabir University in Tehran, Iran to "reject tyranny", Majid Tavalkoli was shown in the (semi-official) Iranian News Agency article pictured below, allegedly in a staged attempt to discredit and humiliate him (appearing beside the picture of a disappeared former Prime Minister who himself was alleged to have escaped the country by the cowardly wearing of women´s clothes).
The trick seems to have backfired on the Iranian regime, however, with hundreds of men from Paris to Istanbul submitting photos of themselves in women´s headgear (or even dressed in the traditional black head-to-toe chador, in the case of one group dancing in Paris) in support of the popular student leader.
Here´s my picture to add to the protest of suppression of dissident voices in any tyrannical regime.
The picture above also is a clickable link to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news article on the solidarity protest from men around the world, and as you can see from my contributing my picture, not just Muslim men, either. And finally, Here´s a link to a video that shows some of the hundreds, if not thousands, of young men (and old, in my case) who have offered up pictures of themselves in the "We are all Majid" public campaign of support for the jailed leader, and some claim, also in support of freeing women from the obligation of wearing (but not the option to choose to wear) the "hijab" (the traditional covering the head) of women in Islamic societies as well. Bahman Amini, an Iranian who lives in Paris and is a bookseller and publisher, told an interviewer, "In the mind of the Iranian authorities, women are inferior to men," he said. "The ´men in headscarves´ campaign is also a refusal by Iranians to this patriarchal and obsolete thought. It is a strong sign of solidarity with the struggle of Iranian women to enjoy full equality with men." He said his participation is in support of Iranian women, who "suffer repression at the hands of Iranian authorities."
Please note that depending on the exact interpretation of Islamic law, this covered head requirement can apply to all women who appear in public in that society, not just "Islamic women". So I´d say my participation here is also in support of women, without the qualifier of just Iranian women.
Note, too, that the color green in many of these pictures also symbolizes Iran´s "opposition movement". A Facebook "Free Majid" page has sprung up as well.
Mr. Myhrvold Has a Dream
Nathan Myhrvold is one of those guys who might be some kind of reincarnation of Mozart, or Alexander Hamilton. He had accomplished so much by the time he was just a few years out of college (which he started at age 15) with a PhD and a year´s post-grad work with world famous Physicist Stephen Hawking an ordinary person might have hung up his track shoes and retired to a hammock in the South Pacific. As many, if not most, of you know, he went on to be the chief scientific officer of Microsoft, where he also made a ton of money, a move that most genius types seem to neglect, especially in early years of a career.
But Nathan is a thinker AND a "do-er" and he has started a company called Intellectual Ventures that invests in inventors and their patents. It now holds some 20,000 patents and files another 500 or so each year. Now I would be inclined to worry that Nathan and friends may tend to spend way too much time acquiring patents and not nearly enough on marketing them with a portfolio that size. It sounds a lot like Nathan has accumulated a paper equivalent of that vast government warehouse in which they "lose" the Arc of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc. But regardless of that potential folly, Nathan Myhrvold has a modest proposal. He recently was offered the opportunity to talk about his theory onFareed Zakaria´s GPS.
Mr. Myhrvold is worried that nobody seems to be paying attention to a "plan B" if a mere reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His concern is that even the massive reductions he and most others believe will be needed to slow or stop the climate change we are experiencing, never mind the mere pittance of reductions that world governments seem willing to set as targets, Myhrvold worries that all of those efforts may still not be enough. And, we don´t have any second arrow in our quiver to continue the fight to save the planet. He is now proposing a plan of action that amounts to "geoengineering", which is to say, planning well in advance, on a global scale to restructure the planet in some way.
Nathan wants to put a very large amount of sulfur into the upper atmosphere to act as a kind of "natural umbrella" reflecting sunlight back out to space and shading the earth below. The key problem with that is his choice of chemical. Nathan wants to build a "large garden hose" from the surface of the earth up to 25,000 meters (25 Kilometers) into the upper atmosphere (he proposes to hold them up there using very high altitude helium balloons). That is about 80,000 feet, well above the path of ordinary aircraft, and besides he wants these contributions to form reflective clouds particularly over the high latitudes, which makes sense, since clearly cooling the polar regions seems the most logical place to start. Mr. Myhrvold´s evidence that this could be a workable plan is that the eruption of a single volcano, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, caused an approximate drop in average temperatures of 1 degree Fahrenheit around the world for about 1 year. Mr. Myhrvold also has a charming story that an eruption of a single volcano in Iceland a couple of centuries ago was, according to a theory developed by Benjamin Franklin (yes, he of the founding of our nation, and the kite flying electricity experiments) what caused the particularly cold winter experienced in much of Europe the following season.
Now, clearly Nathan Myhrvold is no dummy, and he has looked into the science behind this, but I have good news and bad news for him. The choice of micro-particles of sulfur-dioxide is going to cause him some extra resistance, since that is one of the gases that was targeted late in the last century as a cause of "acid rain", and therefore, I predict that adding it to the atmosphere, even at higher altitudes is not going to go over well with environmentalists. Secondly, the good news is that there may be a simpler way to get it into the upper atmosphere that doesn´t involve an Indian rope trick with a hose. A company has developed a "dry process" of turning algae into a fuel for turbine engines. Yes, dry fuel for jet engines made from common algae. Better still, since a modification DOES have to be made to allow this fuel to work in jet engines, it is not likely to gain any quick acceptance in the commercial airline business. When Rolls Royce builds your engines, you don´t rush to put in someone else´s engine (or even modification to your engine) any more than most people would if Rolls Royce built their car. This could work toward Myhrvold´s advantage, because the company making the dry process algae jet fuel is targeting, specifically, RPV´s or UAV´s which is to say, un-manned, remote piloted vehicles like the Global Hawk or Predator drones operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Switching aim from UAV´s to high altitude UAV´s is a slight re-targeting for this company, but also would give them a unique purpose mission. It may or may not be one of those "made for each other" situations, but I really think that Myhrvold´s Intellectual Ventures should be speaking with a company simply calling itself "70centsagallon.com"
The Young Victoria
Emily Blunt who has done good work, but nothing spectacularly notable in The Devil Wears Prada and Sunshine Cleaning in her "second banana" roles there, is at least noble as the longest reigning monarch in the history of the British Empire, in The Young Victoria . Prince Albert, Victoria´s husband, played ably by Rupert Friend keeps the hope alive for both Victoria and the audience in a very creditable performance. Even better is Paul Brettany as Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, handsome enough to threaten to win the heart of the young princess, scheming enough to try, threatening enough to represent some real lurking danger to the monarchy, and yet, ultimately a worthly ally. Miranda Richardson whose great attitude that she would rather play lots of small roles where real acting is required than some star turn that made her rich, has, in my opinion, squandered an opportunity (or been robbed of it by the director, it´s hard to tell) as the Duchess of Kent, Victoria´s mother. Although the Duchess is really one of the main villains of the piece, Ms. Richardson seems to miss, somehow, the character complexity that Rupert Friend brings to his role. The same, unfortunately, can be said about Mark Strong essaying the role of Sir John Conroy, the "strong man" co-conspirator of the Duchess of Kent. In his case, the fault is clear. The character has several potentially explosive, and certainly tension filled private encounters with the Princess/Queen in various hallways of the palace when we could have seen the development of a very interesting dynamic between them, usually with little of nothing spoken, but these moment fizzle on screen. However, Jim Broadbent shows, once again, why he already has an Academy Award on his shelf. His portrayal of King William is the most memorable of the entire film, especially his drunken tirade against his sister-in-law.
Happy Thoughts
I´ve been ranging around trying to come up with a topic that will fit under happy thoughts to about an hour (maybe more), and frankly I am still so annoyed by Senator Joe Lieberman´s partisan crushing of the early Medicare opt-in for people 55 and older, and at Senator Nelson, who not only exempted taxpayers in his home state of Nebraska from paying cost increases which will have to be funded by taxpayers in ALL of the 49 other states, but then he extorted additional language to "strengthen" the separation of "federal funds" from any insurance premium that would cover costs of abortion for any person covered by any federally subsidized health care plan, so that, as described to me (and I haven´t yet verified this from my own investigations) such a person will be required to make out a separate check or in some other way make a separate payment for a separate policy in order to assure that there is no co-mingling of federal funds and funds which might eventually be used to pay for costs associated with abortions, that I am having trouble finding genuinely "happy" thoughts that seem worth writing about.
It is exactly this kind of "my way or the highway," (in Lieberman´s case of putting his "constituents", the big insurance companies of Connecticut ahead of the interests of the nation and the majority of people) as well as the self-righteous cramming of personal religious believe down the throats of the entire population of the nation (Nelson and his Nebraska bible-belt voters) that make me think that democracy is a failed concept because it neglects to take into account the low level of intelligence (and perhaps as important, education) not to mention just plain good sense, in the gross population.
The remaining happy thought in all of this is that something appears, now, to be inevitable to pass the Senate and once that happens, the reconciliation of the two bills (House and Senate) seem almost certain to achieve some sort of law before the expiration of 2010, if not at least slightly before. Now, for goodness sake, let´s get on with Energy, and get this "green revolution" started here at home.
Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://daochienergy.com
DaoChi = The Way of Energy in Harmony & Balance
"Environmentalists" of practically every stripe are licking their wounds on their way home from the Danish disappointment. There is little question that anyone who had pinned any hopes at all on the outcome of this particular one of the ongoing process of UN sponsored Climate Conferences, came away disappointed. With the possible exception of President Obama and his negotiating team. But let´s not jump to conclusions about that assessment just yet.
COP15 had been over-hyped as the gateway to worldwide salvation from the climate and energy conundrum we are in. The US is just not ready to make a significant commitment at this time, partly just because President Obama and his administration have not had time to become entrenched in their positions in the various branches of government, nor to secure sufficient arm-twisting skills in the Congress to get things done that they know must be done to unwind some of the damage accruing from the many years of Republican administrations. I do expect some fairly major international agreement next year, but Obama´s Environmental Protection Agency has just declared carbon dioxide a "health issue" to get some control of auto emissions and some control over coal-fired electric generation facilities, so they need some time to flex those muscles and learn how much control they can exert before they get overwhelming opposition. I think they (the White House) want to make some significant commitments and they want to get their commitments ratified through Congress when they do, but that at this moment they could only make such weak promises as to damage their ability to do more next year.
If you feel as I do, I believe we are certainly correct that somehow the world has not gotten the needed sense of urgency in moving forward. But I think it was months ago that President Obama and his team decided that they were not going to be in a position to get the kind of agreement that he could push, cajole, pull, or lead through both houses of Congress in the coming months, and that getting the Capt and Trade legislation (weak though it might be to start with) in place before making bigger promises to the world. We may not be happy with the most recent outcome, but it does lay the groundwork for a more substantial agreement in coming months, and there is nothing to prevent progress at home between now and then.
Iranian Dissidents Cross-dressing Protests
After giving a "firey" speech urging fellow students at Amir Tabir University in Tehran, Iran to "reject tyranny", Majid Tavalkoli was shown in the (semi-official) Iranian News Agency article pictured below, allegedly in a staged attempt to discredit and humiliate him (appearing beside the picture of a disappeared former Prime Minister who himself was alleged to have escaped the country by the cowardly wearing of women´s clothes).
The trick seems to have backfired on the Iranian regime, however, with hundreds of men from Paris to Istanbul submitting photos of themselves in women´s headgear (or even dressed in the traditional black head-to-toe chador, in the case of one group dancing in Paris) in support of the popular student leader.
Here´s my picture to add to the protest of suppression of dissident voices in any tyrannical regime.
The picture above also is a clickable link to a British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) news article on the solidarity protest from men around the world, and as you can see from my contributing my picture, not just Muslim men, either. And finally, Here´s a link to a video that shows some of the hundreds, if not thousands, of young men (and old, in my case) who have offered up pictures of themselves in the "We are all Majid" public campaign of support for the jailed leader, and some claim, also in support of freeing women from the obligation of wearing (but not the option to choose to wear) the "hijab" (the traditional covering the head) of women in Islamic societies as well. Bahman Amini, an Iranian who lives in Paris and is a bookseller and publisher, told an interviewer, "In the mind of the Iranian authorities, women are inferior to men," he said. "The ´men in headscarves´ campaign is also a refusal by Iranians to this patriarchal and obsolete thought. It is a strong sign of solidarity with the struggle of Iranian women to enjoy full equality with men." He said his participation is in support of Iranian women, who "suffer repression at the hands of Iranian authorities."
Please note that depending on the exact interpretation of Islamic law, this covered head requirement can apply to all women who appear in public in that society, not just "Islamic women". So I´d say my participation here is also in support of women, without the qualifier of just Iranian women.
Note, too, that the color green in many of these pictures also symbolizes Iran´s "opposition movement". A Facebook "Free Majid" page has sprung up as well.
Mr. Myhrvold Has a Dream
Nathan Myhrvold is one of those guys who might be some kind of reincarnation of Mozart, or Alexander Hamilton. He had accomplished so much by the time he was just a few years out of college (which he started at age 15) with a PhD and a year´s post-grad work with world famous Physicist Stephen Hawking an ordinary person might have hung up his track shoes and retired to a hammock in the South Pacific. As many, if not most, of you know, he went on to be the chief scientific officer of Microsoft, where he also made a ton of money, a move that most genius types seem to neglect, especially in early years of a career.
But Nathan is a thinker AND a "do-er" and he has started a company called Intellectual Ventures that invests in inventors and their patents. It now holds some 20,000 patents and files another 500 or so each year. Now I would be inclined to worry that Nathan and friends may tend to spend way too much time acquiring patents and not nearly enough on marketing them with a portfolio that size. It sounds a lot like Nathan has accumulated a paper equivalent of that vast government warehouse in which they "lose" the Arc of the Covenant at the end of Raiders of the Lost Arc. But regardless of that potential folly, Nathan Myhrvold has a modest proposal. He recently was offered the opportunity to talk about his theory onFareed Zakaria´s GPS.
Mr. Myhrvold is worried that nobody seems to be paying attention to a "plan B" if a mere reduction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. His concern is that even the massive reductions he and most others believe will be needed to slow or stop the climate change we are experiencing, never mind the mere pittance of reductions that world governments seem willing to set as targets, Myhrvold worries that all of those efforts may still not be enough. And, we don´t have any second arrow in our quiver to continue the fight to save the planet. He is now proposing a plan of action that amounts to "geoengineering", which is to say, planning well in advance, on a global scale to restructure the planet in some way.
Nathan wants to put a very large amount of sulfur into the upper atmosphere to act as a kind of "natural umbrella" reflecting sunlight back out to space and shading the earth below. The key problem with that is his choice of chemical. Nathan wants to build a "large garden hose" from the surface of the earth up to 25,000 meters (25 Kilometers) into the upper atmosphere (he proposes to hold them up there using very high altitude helium balloons). That is about 80,000 feet, well above the path of ordinary aircraft, and besides he wants these contributions to form reflective clouds particularly over the high latitudes, which makes sense, since clearly cooling the polar regions seems the most logical place to start. Mr. Myhrvold´s evidence that this could be a workable plan is that the eruption of a single volcano, Mount Pinatubo in the Philippines, caused an approximate drop in average temperatures of 1 degree Fahrenheit around the world for about 1 year. Mr. Myhrvold also has a charming story that an eruption of a single volcano in Iceland a couple of centuries ago was, according to a theory developed by Benjamin Franklin (yes, he of the founding of our nation, and the kite flying electricity experiments) what caused the particularly cold winter experienced in much of Europe the following season.
Now, clearly Nathan Myhrvold is no dummy, and he has looked into the science behind this, but I have good news and bad news for him. The choice of micro-particles of sulfur-dioxide is going to cause him some extra resistance, since that is one of the gases that was targeted late in the last century as a cause of "acid rain", and therefore, I predict that adding it to the atmosphere, even at higher altitudes is not going to go over well with environmentalists. Secondly, the good news is that there may be a simpler way to get it into the upper atmosphere that doesn´t involve an Indian rope trick with a hose. A company has developed a "dry process" of turning algae into a fuel for turbine engines. Yes, dry fuel for jet engines made from common algae. Better still, since a modification DOES have to be made to allow this fuel to work in jet engines, it is not likely to gain any quick acceptance in the commercial airline business. When Rolls Royce builds your engines, you don´t rush to put in someone else´s engine (or even modification to your engine) any more than most people would if Rolls Royce built their car. This could work toward Myhrvold´s advantage, because the company making the dry process algae jet fuel is targeting, specifically, RPV´s or UAV´s which is to say, un-manned, remote piloted vehicles like the Global Hawk or Predator drones operating in Iraq and Afghanistan. Switching aim from UAV´s to high altitude UAV´s is a slight re-targeting for this company, but also would give them a unique purpose mission. It may or may not be one of those "made for each other" situations, but I really think that Myhrvold´s Intellectual Ventures should be speaking with a company simply calling itself "70centsagallon.com"
The Young Victoria
Emily Blunt who has done good work, but nothing spectacularly notable in The Devil Wears Prada and Sunshine Cleaning in her "second banana" roles there, is at least noble as the longest reigning monarch in the history of the British Empire, in The Young Victoria . Prince Albert, Victoria´s husband, played ably by Rupert Friend keeps the hope alive for both Victoria and the audience in a very creditable performance. Even better is Paul Brettany as Prime Minister Lord Melbourne, handsome enough to threaten to win the heart of the young princess, scheming enough to try, threatening enough to represent some real lurking danger to the monarchy, and yet, ultimately a worthly ally. Miranda Richardson whose great attitude that she would rather play lots of small roles where real acting is required than some star turn that made her rich, has, in my opinion, squandered an opportunity (or been robbed of it by the director, it´s hard to tell) as the Duchess of Kent, Victoria´s mother. Although the Duchess is really one of the main villains of the piece, Ms. Richardson seems to miss, somehow, the character complexity that Rupert Friend brings to his role. The same, unfortunately, can be said about Mark Strong essaying the role of Sir John Conroy, the "strong man" co-conspirator of the Duchess of Kent. In his case, the fault is clear. The character has several potentially explosive, and certainly tension filled private encounters with the Princess/Queen in various hallways of the palace when we could have seen the development of a very interesting dynamic between them, usually with little of nothing spoken, but these moment fizzle on screen. However, Jim Broadbent shows, once again, why he already has an Academy Award on his shelf. His portrayal of King William is the most memorable of the entire film, especially his drunken tirade against his sister-in-law.
Happy Thoughts
I´ve been ranging around trying to come up with a topic that will fit under happy thoughts to about an hour (maybe more), and frankly I am still so annoyed by Senator Joe Lieberman´s partisan crushing of the early Medicare opt-in for people 55 and older, and at Senator Nelson, who not only exempted taxpayers in his home state of Nebraska from paying cost increases which will have to be funded by taxpayers in ALL of the 49 other states, but then he extorted additional language to "strengthen" the separation of "federal funds" from any insurance premium that would cover costs of abortion for any person covered by any federally subsidized health care plan, so that, as described to me (and I haven´t yet verified this from my own investigations) such a person will be required to make out a separate check or in some other way make a separate payment for a separate policy in order to assure that there is no co-mingling of federal funds and funds which might eventually be used to pay for costs associated with abortions, that I am having trouble finding genuinely "happy" thoughts that seem worth writing about.
It is exactly this kind of "my way or the highway," (in Lieberman´s case of putting his "constituents", the big insurance companies of Connecticut ahead of the interests of the nation and the majority of people) as well as the self-righteous cramming of personal religious believe down the throats of the entire population of the nation (Nelson and his Nebraska bible-belt voters) that make me think that democracy is a failed concept because it neglects to take into account the low level of intelligence (and perhaps as important, education) not to mention just plain good sense, in the gross population.
The remaining happy thought in all of this is that something appears, now, to be inevitable to pass the Senate and once that happens, the reconciliation of the two bills (House and Senate) seem almost certain to achieve some sort of law before the expiration of 2010, if not at least slightly before. Now, for goodness sake, let´s get on with Energy, and get this "green revolution" started here at home.
Love and warm wishes,
Sincerely,
Stafford "Doc" Williamson
http://daochienergy.com
DaoChi = The Way of Energy in Harmony & Balance
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