Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 319

It’s Not Easy Being Grün

One country is learning the hard way:

Gemany is in the middle of one of the most audacious and ambitious experiments a major industrial economy has ever attempted: To swear off nuclear power and run Europe’s largest economy essentially on wind and solar power.

There’s just one problem – it’s not really working.

The energy transformation, known as “Energiewende,” was meant to give Germany an energy sector that would be cleaner and more competitive, fueling an export-driven economy and helping to slash greenhouse-gas emissions. On that count, the policy has floundered: German emissions are rising, not falling, because the country is burning increasing amounts of dirty coal. And electricity costs, already high, have kept rising, making life difficult for small and medium-sized businesses that compete against rivals with cheaper energy. …

Business groups representing small and medium firms wring their hands over Germany’s high energy costs while Brussels frets that Berlin is subsidizing big German industry with rebates on inflated energy bills. Foreign leaders, and plenty of pundits, blame the Energiewende for Europe’s inability to answer Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Utilities, meanwhile, are bleeding money, slashing investments, and shutting down power plants.

Keating has more on the country’s troubles:

Despite Angela Merkel’s government’s focus on green energy, the country’s coal use actually hit its highest level since 1990 last year. With no conventionally extractable natural gas on its own, some are also recommending that the government consider hydraulic fracturing in Germany, which the government currently opposes on environmental grounds.

All of Merkel’s government’s goals—shifting to renewable energy, weaning the country off Russian gas, reducing the risk of nuclear accidents—have been admirable, but doing them all at once raises some questions about how exactly the country plans to keep the lights on in the medium-to-long term. It would be an unfortunate irony if coal and fracking ended up being the beneficiaries of Merkel’s green energy push.

Our Best Weapon Against Climate Change?

Charles C. Mann argues that developing carbon capture and storage (CCS) technology – or “clean coal” – is more important than developing renewables:

Conceptually speaking, CCS is simple: Industries burn just as much coal as before but remove all the pollutants. In addition to scrubbing out ash and soot, now standard practice at many big plants, they separate out the carbon dioxide and pump it underground, where it can be stored for thousands of years.

Many energy and climate researchers believe that CCS is vital to avoiding a climate catastrophe. Because it could allow the globe to keep burning its most abundant fuel source while drastically reducing carbon dioxide and soot, it may be more important—though much less publicized—than any renewable-energy technology for decades to come. No less than Steven Chu, the Nobel-winning physicist who was US secretary of energy until last year, has declared CCS essential. “I don’t see how we go forward without it,” he says.

Unfortunately, taking that step will be incredibly difficult. Even though most of the basic concepts are well understood, developing reliable, large-scale CCS facilities will be time-consuming, unglamorous, and breathtakingly costly. Engineers will need to lavish time and money on painstaking calculations, minor adjustments, and cautious experiments. At the end, the world will have several thousand giant edifices that everyone regards as eyesores. Meanwhile, environmentalists have lobbied hard against the technology, convinced that it represents a sop to the coal industry at the expense of cleaner alternatives like solar and wind. As a consequence, CCS is widely regarded as both critical to the future and a quagmire.

How You Fund Creationism

Part of your paycheck goes to religious schools:

Taxpayers in 14 states will bankroll nearly $1 billion this year in tuition for private schools, including hundreds of religious schools that teach Earth is less than 10,000 years old, Adam and Eve strolled the garden with dinosaurs, and much of modern biology, geology and cosmology is a web of lies. Now a major push to expand these voucher programs is under way from Alaska to New York, a development that seems certain to sharply increase the investment.

Public debate about science education tends to center on bills like one in Missouri, which would allow public school parents to pull their kids from science class whenever the topic of evolution comes up. But the more striking shift in public policy has flown largely under the radar, as a well-funded political campaign has pushed to open the spigot for tax dollars to flow to private schools. Among them are Bible-based schools that train students to reject and rebut the cornerstones of modern science.

Decades of litigation have established that public schools cannot teach creationism or intelligent design. But private schools receiving public subsidies can — and do. A POLITICO review of hundreds of pages of course outlines, textbooks and school websites found that many of these faith-based schools go beyond teaching the biblical story of the six days of creation as literal fact. Their course materials nurture disdain of the secular world, distrust of momentous discoveries and hostility toward mainstream scientists. They often distort basic facts about the scientific method — teaching, for instance, that theories such as evolution are by definition highly speculative because they haven’t been elevated to the status of “scientific law.” And this approach isn’t confined to high school biology class; it is typically threaded through all grades and all subjects.

Check out several “science lessons from the Bible” here.

(Image via Stallion Cornell)

Sticks And Stones And “Homosexual” Ctd

More readers sound off:

Regarding your posts on sticks and stones, and the difficulty of pronouncing LGBT, I suggest LUGBUT. Works for men, women, and transexuals. And it has a plural: LUGBUTS.

Another variety:

I’m sort of fond of the name my wife’s college pro-tolerance came up for themselves: The Giblets (from GBLT, because why not). OK, I’m not fond of it, but at least it rolls off the tongue, and it sounds potentially lewd besides, which is a plus.

Another adds, “I prefer GQ BLT – it sounds like a delicious designer sandwich, which is incredibly meta.” A more serious take from our Facebook page:

Homosexual has an important place in our lexicon; I frequently use it to describe people who have sex with (mostly) men, but do not identify a gay. Gay implies homosexual orientation with self-acceptance. I’m gay, but Ted Haggard is homosexual.

A fussbudget notes:

Your reader speaks imprecisely and you reinforce the imprecision. “LGBT” is not an acronym; it is an initialism. An initialism is a word made up of the first letters (usually) of other words, like an acronym, but unlike an acronym, not pronounced as a word itself. RADAR, SCUBA, NATO and SNAFU are acronyms. CIA, LGBTQIA and USA are initialisms. There are many explanations out there – here’s one. The several print dictionaries I have lying around my university library office do not make the distinction, but it is important to those of us who were toilet trained by the age of one and who like things just so. Picky-picky.

Update from a pickier reader:

Excuse me for out fussbudgeting the fussbudget, but radar, scuba, and snafu are no longer acronyms. Dictionaries now define them as nouns. They have morphed from acronyms into words over the years. That’s why they are no longer spelled in all caps. Your reader is correct that NATO is an acronym. NASA, NAFTA, UNICEF, POTUS, TARP, and OPEC are also acronyms. They are written in all caps and pronounced as if a word.

Climate Catharsis

Emmett Rensin feels the rise of Bill Nye as a “climate change star” is “deeply rooted in how the left engages in debates over scientific reality”:

Bill Nye calls his new life as a political pundit a “patriotism.” It’s a war he probably won’t win. If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change can’t convince the diehard climate-change deniers, the Science Guy probably doesn’t stand a chance. But his performance so far hasn’t disappointed, and that’s exactly the point: It’s a performance. That may be exactly what the rational side, exhausted from years of outrage and alarm, needs today. If the deniers cannot be reasoned with like adults, then at least let’s be entertained by the dismantling of their arguments and exposure of their ignorance—if only to make us laugh, and thereby preserve our sanity. And given that reasoning, who better to debate these intransigent skeptics than an impossibly patient ex-comedian who not only made science fun for children, but made their parents laugh, too?

The Quintessential American Word: “Hi!” Ctd

The following quote from British comedian Tom Cowell’s pros and cons of Americans is a great complement to this mega-popular Dish post from last year:

Americans are so wonderfully, sincerely down-to-earth, we have trouble believing it. To the cynical British mind, any genuine pleasure in meeting a new person is a sign of potential mental illness. But Americans actually want to make new friends. They want to get along with you, stranger. It makes one’s like infinitely more interesting to have an American around, because you meet EVERYONE. It’s like permanently going through life with a puppy, or the latest iPhone.

Mental Health Break

A requiem for Roseland:

Kishi Bashi – Philosophize in It! Chemicalize with It! from Geoff Hoskinson on Vimeo.

Immature Technology

Joshua Gans urges tech companies not to chase after only after teens:

That is because the overwhelming picture of the teenager as a consumer is of a person that is going to change. Teenagers are doing things that they did not do as children and that they will not do as adults. Thus, as a consumer, they are transitory and not in a good way. Unlike childhood demand where there will always be other children to consume toys such as Lego, the next wave of teenagers will engage in their behavior using the next available technology (or fashion). And since there have been teenagers that technology has been changing.

This notion of the transient consumer implies something very strong: business exclusively built on teenager demand will lose their customers. This is as true of musicians (which is why we will soon be free of Bieber) as it is of technology (remember the Sidekick) and social networks (consider MySpace). This suggests that businesses that have become the darling of teenagers should make hay while the sun shines or, and this is the tricky part, work out how to broaden their customer base to include adults. Either way, worrying about teenager demand is futile.

The Tragedies We Cover

Shafer considers why the Oso, WA landslide has gotten so much press:

Not to diminish the cataclysm and the human loss, but for all its fearful power and creepiness, the landslide isn’t much of a killer — at least not in America. According to a Wikipedia chart of major landslides worldwide since 1900, only 11 have struck the United States, including the one in Oso. When you factor out landslides propagated by exploding volcanos (Mount St. Helens), earthquake-tsunamis (Seward, Alaska, and Lituya Bay, Alaska) and hurricanes (Nelson County, Va.), the death count falls very low. Before Oso, fewer than two dozen people had died in all other major U.S. landslides, which you could count on two fingers (Gros Ventre, Wyo., and La Conchita, Calif.). …

Avalanches, much more frequent and deadly than landslides, don’t enthrall readers and journalists because our curiosity about how they form and how and why they kill has been adequately covered. The landslide, as an atypical disaster, demands great concentration by the press. Most reporters (outside of landslide territory) have probably never covered one, leaving hundreds of questions to ask and answer. Explainers must be posed and sorted out. Follow-ups assigned. Historical records searched. Curiosity sated.

Why Are Kids Abandoning Football?

Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban took to Facebook Monday to elaborate on his “comments about the NFL imploding in TEN YEARS”:

I wouldn’t want my son playing football, would you ? I’m sure helmet technology will improve over the next 10 years, but why risk it? There are plenty of sports to play. Plenty of ways to get exercise and if my son decided to do anything outside of sports and never pick up any ball of any kind, I’m fine with that. I can think of 1k things I would prefer him to get excited about doing.

As far as watching, I good with that. I don’t think I’m alone. If we start to see a decline of popularity at the high school and then college level because kids choose other sports, it will hurt the interest in watching the NFL[.]

But the drop-off in young football players is still less pronounced than in basketball and baseball. Neil Paine suggests less youth interest for a different reason:

The NFL’s high-profile concussion issues might be playing some role in the sport’s falling popularity among kids. But as Forbes’ Bob Cook pointed out in November, the effect is just as likely attributable to other factors, including the increasing trend toward specialization in young athletes. Cook noted that data from sporting-goods retailers shows an increase in sales among hardcore football players ages 7 to 11 and a sharp decrease among more casual players in the same age range. In essence, players who don’t receive a large investment in their careers at a young age appear to be getting squeezed out of organized football.