Biodome

...was a shitty movie.

No really, it was. But lately I've been doing a lot of thinking about enclosed ecosystems as a potential cure for certain problems we face today. Hear me out on this, it might take a little while to loop around and come back home.

In his book Green Metropolis, David Owen suggests that one of the greatest environmentalist bastions ever created is, in fact, the "big city". Of course, big cities typically look dirty when compared to the pristine lawns of suburbia and the open skies of the country, but consider what both of those "cleaner" places require.

1. Because of their vast horizontal scale, it takes time to get anywhere worth going. And when it takes time to get somewhere, what do people use? Cars.
1. This is exaccerbated by the fact that in suburbia, most people have cars. Many people have multiple cars, and mass transit might not be an option.
2. With horizontal space comes things that we like to do to that space. For instance: build a big house, have a big lawn, etc.
1. Odds are, we don't use all the space in our house. Speaking personally, my apartment is a "mere" 800 square feet, and I don't use all of the space. I have a second freaking bedroom I never go into, except to iron my shirts and bemoan my "green room" idea. (But that's another story).
2. If we do buy a house/apartment bigger than we need, guess what we typically do? Fill it up with stuff! All sorts of cool shit we didn't know we wanted until we saw it- and included with this stuff is the environmental cost of production (for both the product and its packaging, because plastic apparently has to be fucking bulletproof these days) and the cost of transporting it to market.
3. If you have a lawn, guess what you probably use? Fertilizer! Weed killer! Gas-powered lawn mowers! Now multiply that by however many millions of suburban lawns there are.
3. And of course, if we want to use that horizontal space to build our homes in, we have to clear whatever was there beforehand. This might mean draining a swamp, cutting down trees, etc.
1. And remember- individual, free-standing houses have to be individually heated and cooled. That costs money and energy.

But in a city? Space is limited. You very well might not own a car, because parking in a city is a bitch. Mass transit becomes an option again, because a) traffic is still terrible even if a lot of folks don't have cars, and b) there are enough people living in a small enough space to economically justify running a fleet of busses- and their destinations are close enough to walk to, once they disembark. You can't go buy tons of random shit because you won't have anywhere to put it. You probably don't even have a lawn, and if you do, it's probably a small patch of crabgrass by the stoop.  And because cities can be a vertical entity rather than a horizontal one, there's less clearing of land- plus, apartments are heated as a block, so keeping your place warm requires less energy, since your neighbors' apartments act as insulation.

So what does all this city-slicker environmentalism have to do with enclosed ecosystems?

Well, one of the unavoidable things we need the wide-open spaces of the country for is food production. To produce enough food for everyone*, you need the sort of acreage that you see in the midwest.
Or- do you?
What I've been wondering is whether or not we could start supplimenting our diets with food grown in enclosed areas in the cities.

You'd start by selecting a set of plants and animals that play well together. Simplistically, think of it like this- start with "The people want fish", so, we put fish in an artificial river. Some of these fish are harvested, others are left to mature, and still others are used as fertilizer for a collection of plants. Some of these plants filter the water, and some of them act as food for our fish. Rinse, repeat.

Clearly, the implimentation is far more complex, but this is what I've been thinking about. Obviously we couldn't replace all of our intake in this manner- you simply can't feed 300,000,000+ people by farming vertically- but think of the benefits.

People in a city could come and see exactly where their food is coming from. The food would be as fresh as it gets, and because it's from an enclosed system, we wouldn't need any nasty pesticides or what have you. You wouldn't have to worry about frost or flooding. Because the plants and animals would be selected in such a way that there is both a market demand for them AND a synergy between them, you could save a fortune on expensive filtering systems. And I'd bet there's a way to subsidize these places, city by city, such that the money it costs to maintain the joint is more than offset by the amount of money you'd save in medical costs stemming from shitty nutrition down the road.
You could sell the food right downstairs, or in a farmer's market wherever. You could rent plots of land to people who want to raise these crops or these animals. Have schools come in, tour the place, and let people reconnect with their food sources. And shit, toss some wind turbines and solar pannels on the roof to make it all as green as possible.

You'd even save money not having to transport this food over the river and through the woods. Lower food costs mean people can spend money elsewhere.

And again, this is all dreaming. But I can't get the thought out of my head that there may be a market here.

Happiness is a Four Letter Word

Recently I did some thinking, and I came to the conclusion that I am not happy.

I thought long and hard about it, mulling this post over for about a week; cutting this, adding that, starting completely from scratch. I usually just write something and, if it doesn't need any sources, just let it go after the first or second read-through, but this time I couldn't shake the feeling that all previous iterations sounded... whiny. Mostly because I kept asking myself- what have I to be unhappy about?

I have a job that doesn't pay me a lot, but it pays me enough. Though my friends are by and large very far away from me, I still have friends that care. The same goes for my family, who raised me in an upper-middle class section of a safe town. I have my health, my youth, an advanced education, and through an undeserved confluence of favorable genetic lottery winnings, I am a white male in America.

What do I have to be unhappy about?

Not only do I have these boons, but I work with people who have nothing. No family, no real friends, no job or posessions of their own. They're so debilitated by their mental illnesses, which is often an unholy coctail of something like borderline personality disorder, antisocial personality disorder, bipolar disorder, various flavors of hallucinations or delusions AND borderline intellectual functioning... that a hospital is the only place that they can function. It's a red-letter week when they get an extra bag of popcorn on Friday because they went 7 days without attacking anyone.

I would look at my own lack of happiness, and then I would look at the circumstances of my patients, and I would say to my reflection in the mirror, "You think YOU have problems? You have NOTHING of the sort. You know what problems are. Your issues are jokes. Man up and move on."

But I wasn't any happier.

At this point, I have to distinguish something- Most days, I wasn't happy... but most days, I was content. Or at least, content enough. As long as I made sure to do things I enjoy, things that make me feel like I'm growing, then I could accept where I was. My situation wasn't ideal, so I had to have that sensation of forward momentum to stay sane.

But even in staying sane, I wasn't happy.

However, believe it or not, this is not about my own feelings. I'm using myself as an example, but I'm not writing this to delve into what kept me from being happy. I'm writing this because in my endless re-writes of this post, I started thinking about the nature of happiness, contentedment, and unhappiness. Because as I thought, I came to realize- I might not be happy, but I'm typically not actively unhappy, either. I'm mostly just... "meh".

So then I wondered, are other people like this? Other folks in my field, in other but similarly low-pay fields? How about richer folks, people who actually qualify as "middle class"? Or how about that fabled "1%"? Does money have anything to do with it? You always hear money doesn't buy happiness (though Daniel Tosh would tell you, it does buy a waverunner, and have you ever seen an unhappy person on a waverunner?)

So I'm not usually running around gushing about how ecstatic I am, but neither am I playing a solo game of pity me. And I guess that's ok- certainly better than if I was actively bemoaning my fate- but I felt like something was amiss. Wasn't I supposed to be happy? That's what I keep hearing. "Follow your dreams! If you love your work you'll never work a day in your life!" I see these commercials for antidepressants, but the message is not "restore a chemical balance to your dopaminergic pathways", it's "take this pill to BE HAPPY". That sinks in after the millionth or so ad for Zoloft.

Then I started thinking, what if this whole happiness push is just a marketing campaign?

And THEN I started thinking- what if I don't actually have to be happy at all?
(At least, not most of the time).

I realize that's a strange position to take, but consider it. Aside from the lucky few who have jobs that fulfil them on every level (and fuck you if one of you is reading this), how often do you wake up thinking, "Oh boy, time to go to work again"? Put another way, imagine you had to rank how happy your day was, overall, each day for a month. You do this on a scale from 1-10, 1 being "terrible", 5 being "neither overly happy or unhappy", and 10 being "exceedingly happy". What do you think your average score would come out to be?

I'd bet good money that you'd likely wall between 4 and 6. I'd give you a 68.2% chance of landing there, as a matter of fact- and I'd give you a 95.4% chance of falling between 3 and 7. Those numbers aren't just values I plucked out of thin air; they're the % of the population that'll fall within 1-2 standard deviations of the mean in a normal bell curve. Does that sound like statistical jubberish to you? Look it up. (If a Psych guy can get it, you can to; have no fear).

The point is, I'd be willing to bet that for most people, most days are unremarkable. Thats kind of what makes them most days. And that's all well and good- I try to take any day that doesn't actively suck donkey balls as a victory- but I started wondering, if most days are mostly "meh" for folks in the grand scheme of things, why do we appear to be so hyper-focused on getting happiness like it's some XBox of Life achievement? "YES, I totally got Rank 3 Happiness! I am AMAZING!"

Because, even someone with a novice's experience with modern video games knows what comes next.

"...Fuckall, now I need to earn Rank 4 Happiness."

So as I sat there, typing out the conclusion of my little monologue, I thought to myself- maybe that random idea that popped into my head was right. Maybe the trick isn't to be happy each and every day. Maybe it isn't even to be happy most days. Maybe the trick is to cross one set of fingers that you'll be happy on some days, and cross the other set that you're unhappy less often than that.

I Dream of Gringo

I have a confession to male.
It’s only three days since the election, and I’ve already engaged in my personal self-harming action of choice. No, dear reader, I am not a cutter; I do not binge and purge; I do not engage in fits of manic spending or sexual abandon (except in the case of your mom). No, my demon is a far darker creature, more apt to ignore the immediate gratification of self-mutilation and partake in the soul-crushing long game.

I’ve started reading about the 2016 election cycle.

“How can this be?!” You might ask, and you’d be justified in your confusion. After all, we just got done with the whole blasted mess, how can I be so full of hatred for my sanity that I’m already looking up information regarding an event that won’t take place until I’m 30?
Because, my friend, in four years we may have the chance to see a deathblow leveled against a major political party. I’ll do my best to prognosticate about this with as little bias as possible, even though the claim itself may appear biased to begin with. I’m simply exploring a possibility.

Obama killed it with non-whites. No reason trying to call this anything other than what it was; it was an absolute stomping. I could waste my time trying to explain why this took place, but rather than do that I’d like to extrapolate outwards. Let’s look at Latinos, for example. They’re the fastest-growing population in the country; according to Pew research they accounted for 46% of the nation’s growth between 2000 and 2010- this group jumped from contributing about 35,306,000 people to our population… to 50,478,000. That increase is enormous. Latinos increased their number by almost half over ten years, coming to ~16% of our entire population. By contrast? Us white boys only got together with enough white girls to bring the Gringo vote from 194.5 million to 196.8 million (that’s about half a percent increase). While that’s still a huge head start, the gap is closing by leaps and bounds.
Now consider this. Assuming similar rates of population growth over the next ten and twenty years, we could be looking at an American electorate with a Latino population of 112 million or so, compared to a White population only a few million higher than it currently is.

Why is this important?
In an electorate that decides its President by a margin of only a few million votes here or there, any one population that is growing faster that the others must be paid special attention to; pretending that the population growth of Latinos isn’t important is political suicide. Similarly equitable to electoral seppuku is taking a hard-right stance on immigration issues, as Mitt Romney did by supporting “self-deportation”, which is essentially hoping that illegal immigrants find the atmosphere of the country so unfavorable that they get up and leave on their own. Other conservative standpoints, such as building a wall on “every mile, on every yard, on every foot, on every inch of the southern border” do the Republican brand no favors with people of Latino heritage. (It’s also a completely untenable construction project, but that’s beside the point).

All of these issues for conservatives combine into a possibility that if, within the next four years, immigration reform can be attained? The credit could very easily go to President Obama and the Democrats. I’m not going to speculate about the staying power of the DREAM Act (or something like it) if its passed early in Obama’s second term; nor will I speculate about the number of Latinos (or voters in general) this could net the Democrats come 2016. What I can say is that any cursory inspection of the news will reveal how powerful an issue immigration reform is for the Latino community; a poll conducted by Latin Insights on behalf of Fox News in March of 2012 revealed 90% support for President Obama’s DREAM Act. Pew Research’s Hispanic Center found that 91% of Latinos supported DREAM; 84% supported giving in-state tuition to undocumented students.

TL;DR: This is a big fucking deal.

…Which brings me back to my original claim. I went out on a limb and said that we could witness a deathblow to a major American political party, and I stand by that possibility. Republicans currently stand almost entirely on the wrong side of this issue, politically speaking. Never mind who’s actually right or wrong; the fastest growing population in America says immigration reform is a huge deal, and the Republican party couldn’t trip over itself fast enough to tack further and further to the right on the issue. They very well could have saved their election efforts if they hadn’t have alienated this key demographic. If they continue to talk about border-length fences and self-deportation, or -as some have suggested- if they react to their recent loss by deciding they haven’t been conservative enough, I would think they can expect to continue losing seats in both houses. And that trend, combined with the losses experienced from most other minorities, could spell the deathknell of their party.

Or the Tea Party 2 could come along and prove me wrong. But only time will tell.

Obama Out of the Closet for Gay Marriage

So, earlier today, President Obama said he supports gay marriage. Simply put, these are my thoughts.

First of all: this was politically motivated. Coming on the heels of North Carolina’s state constitutional ban of gay marriage, Obama wanted to shore up some support from his base- support that has been lackluster by many accounts. I believe that he made the determination (correctly so) that a lot of the people that would hate him for supporting gay marriage were also people that weren’t going to vote for him anyway… but that a lot of the people that would appreciate his support of gay marriage were people that might be less likely to vote or donate if he didn’t support it. “My views are evolving”, my ass; he waited for the right time to drop this bomb, and saw an opportunity here.

Second, he was not boxed in by Joe Biden. Uncle Joe might have his “Big Effin’ Deal” moments, as well as a horrendously awkward introduction of another Head of State, but he’s not going to paint his boss into a corner on an issue this big. He was the man on point for this issue. I’ve no doubt that he honestly believes what he said about being comfortable with gay marriage, I just believe that his job was to channel that belief into a pragmatic political strategy, stick his neck out and gauge the response. Since there wasn’t enough vitriol spat at him, the plan for Obama to voice his support after the NC vote went forward.

Third, things are going to get ugly. And I mean UGLY. This is one of the biggest battle lines in American politics, and it gets people pissed. Those who support gay marriage have long been without a big-name champion; now they have one, and as far as champions go, you don’t get any bigger name than the President. With presumptive-nominee Mitt Romney still coming out against gay marriage, people have their figureheads to rally around. Expect woefully inaccurate attack ads from both sides in all 50 states. Expect a firestorm.

Fourth: this is, all in all, a good thing. If you’re against same-sex marriage… then, I’m sorry, but you’re simply wrong. Allow me to support my position with some handy bullet points, now with 15% fewer calories.

The “research” that says it’s terrible is wrong, wrong, and wrong some more. The idea that kids do better in two-parent homes is correct- but it doesn’t matter which sex the parents are. They just need good parents.

The idea that marriage is something that needs to be defended (by straight people) is ridiculous when nationally, just about half of marriages end in divorce… and is doubly absurd when the states that resist gay marriage the hardest are also the states with the highest individual divorce rates, highest rates of teenaged pregnancies (and the higher rates of teenaged marriage... and divorce). That’s some high and mighty instiution you’re defending, there! (Get off your self-righteous horse, Southern States.)

The idea that it’s against the Bible or God’s Will for the nation or something- tough cookies. There’s that whole separation of church and state deal. (First Amendment; "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof". It means the government can't pass a law giving preference to any one religion or it's opinions. Not even yours. So essentially, whatever it is you interpret God's opinion to be on gay marriage, it doesn't matter; the issue has to be handled based on its mortal, non-religious merits.)

And lastly, people sure don’t want Big Government getting involved in their lives… until they do. You can’t have it both ways, kids. Either tell the government to GTFO as a whole, and let each state decide… or, have the government come in and accept the results on a national level. But you might want to have Uncle Sam make a ruling on it quickly, because as time goes on, you might not like the results.

Nina Easton, Mayor of Wrongville

It’s scheduling week here at the hospital; the twice-yearly week long exercise of figuring out which classes go where on the master schedule of my wing. We were fortunate in that the planning itself only took a day, but now we have the rest of the week to finish paperwork, write new course descriptions, and so forth. For me, this doesn’t take too long, and so I was left enough time at lunch today to check out what was going on around the internet. And that is when I found this op-ed.

First of all, let’s ignore the fact that the author, Nina Easton, is a conservative. I’m not a big fan of the “They disagree with me, so they must be wrong” mindset that has infected my country in years past, and so I try to combat it whenever possible. For instance- if she’s worked for Fortune, the LA Times and the Boston Globe, she’s probably at least fairly on top of her game. So don’t brush her off just because she happens to be a conservative talking about the virtues of “The 1%”.

Nope, we’re going to assume for the sake of this post that Ms. Easton is a purely non-biased reporter, speaking her mind without a political agenda behind her.

And we’re going to assume that  she’s unbiased because if we don’t, and we believe that she’s just a conservative mouthpiece, then her writing is immediately as invalid as Glenn Beck’s or Keith Olberman’s.

And we’re going to assume that she’s unbiased, because even if we do, she is still completely wrong.

Ms. Easton’s article is based on the same tired assumption that a lot of conservatives have been making, and that is that the furor surrounding the One Percent is based on jealousy. She bases her fifth paragraph on the notion that people who’re mad at the mega-rich want their money stripped from them and moved into their own community, like they want President Obama to swing in like some governmental Robin Hood to give the poor their due.

But I don’t think that’s what this anger Easton complains of is about. People want larger salaries of their own, but I don’t think they want someone else’s money. This isn’t about being angry at someone because they’re successful, it’s about being mad at someone because they became successful at the expense of their workers. CEOs that continue to take enormous bonuses immediately after laying off some percentage of their labor force. Finance moguls who profit by cheating their clients and then escape any significant punishment. These seem to be what the “99%ers” are really upset about.

“But there are communists at the Occupy rallies that want all the rich to hand over all their money!” Yes, and there are Secessionists at NRA rallies that still talk about preparing for the inevitable war between the government and their local “militia”. Spare me your generalizations about the Occupy Communists and I’ll spare you my vitriol for your Rambo Wannabes. There are crazies at every rally.

But I digress. I’ll counterpoint my own argument: CEOs taking huge salaries and bonuses.

Global finance is fucking complicated. I’m personally of the opinion that monetary sums in the neighborhood of the trillions-of-dollars-mark is actually imaginary, but some people are smart enough to actually finagle this possibly-imaginary system to produce real-world results. People that can do that do deserve big salaries, because if they don’t get paid, yeah, they’re gonna go find someone who’ll shell out the cheddar to please them.

But. Just because John Q. Employee doesn’t understand how the price of grain in India affects the rubber trade in South America, that doesn’t mean that he deserves to get the axe so his boss-of-bosses can get another couple thousand on their bonus check. When this happens to one person, or in one company, its unfortunate… but the now-jobless employees could just go get jobs elsewhere. When this happens on a national scale and becomes the status quo, however, people become embittered on a national scale, and that bitterness becomes the status quo. Don’t act so goddamn surprised that people are up in arms over the super-rich when it seems like every CEO is doing this.

Earlier on than this, she states in her third paragraph that “The 1% club stands accused, accurately, of more than doubling its share of the nation's income since 1980. By 2007 it controlled nearly 24% of total income, the second highest in history, after 1929. (In 2009 its share dropped to 17%, suggesting that recessions aren't necessarily kind to the rich.)”

This is not an argument I would make if I were trying to draw support to my point of view. The richest 1%’s collective bargaining power dropped from ONE QUARTER OF ALL AMERICAN WEALTH to just a paltry SEVENTEEN PERCENT? Boo fucking hoo. If I were her editor I would have deleted this paragraph from her entry so hard the computer would have exploded. I would have then taken the ashes and thrown them into the goddamn sea, just so nobody would ever read what Nina Easton almost perpetrated on my point of view.

Easton states in her fourth paragraph that “Railing about the 1% club has become shorthand for expressing outrage not only over growing income disparity but also about the state of the nation's working class.” I would agree with that as a one-off statement, but since it isn’t a one-off statement, it can only be viewed as the most accurate thing Nina Easton has accidentally said all day.

She notes in her sixth paragraph that Wall Street bonuses have dropped “18,000, or 13%, to $121,150. It is the second lowest average in the last eight years, topping only the $100,850 of 2008. This estimate tracks cash payments and doesn't include stock options or other forms of deferred compensation that haven't been realized.” Again, this is not something I would say out loud if I were trying to assuage the malice directed at the One Percent. A bonus of $100,000 is still nearly four times what I make as a salary, after taxes, and I sure as shit don’t get stock options.
Again, my job is different than a Wall Street suit’s, but as long as we’re comparing, I’d like to see him swing by my unit and handle some of our boys. Just sayin’.

She does make some good points; she states that there are some legitimate reasons why the One Percent are making so much freaking money these days, such as technological advances that allow companies to globalize in ways that simply were not possible even twenty years ago. (Her comparison is to a performer in the 1600s. I'm not sure why.)
She also cites the fact that womens’ salaries are rising, and she states that if you take a random well-paid One Percenter male, odds are he has an equally educated female counterpart in house as well. With her salary on the up and up, she claims that it’s only natural for the rich to become richer without any devious dealings going on- and on the face value of that factor, at least, she could be right.

But unfortunately, while she’s right in isolated pockets, she’s wrong on the foundation of her article. Like so many others, she falls into the trap of thinking that this “populist rage” is based on jealousy, and not out of our observation of how warped the system is in favor of the rich. She touts the belief that the rich are faulted for their success, and fails to even acknowledge -no, outright denies- that the rich have become as successful as they are in large part by exploiting their workers and clients. That’s where this “populist rage” is coming from (which, I’ll add, wasn’t generating a peep of protest from conservatives when the Tea Party was the new thing, but that’s another rant). I’m not trying to defend Occupy as a movement, as it is largely a worthless endeavor these days, but the underlying sentiment?
That isn't going anywhere.

Modesty Is For People Who Suck (Some Links NSFW)

"Modesty Is For People Who Suck" is a line that I came up with a couple years ago. I find it funny that I’m the one spreading it around work, and it’s a bit of a joke to me- but in other ways, it isn’t. I decided to write about its underlying components of confidence versus conceit today, through an examination of the portrayal of womens’ sexuality by the media.

I don’t think I’d be causing anyone to double-take if I informed you that a lot of fashion outlets tend to base their ideal of beauty around a slender figure. Runway models have been stereotyped as under-eaters, bulimics or anorexics for years- often with a fair amount of truth behind it. If you look at any female-targeted weight loss plan, many of the “after” pictures have women that have gone down to a size 2, if not a size 0.

The fact that there even IS a “size zero” is ridiculous in my mind. Zero implies a lack of value; a complete absence of whatever it is you’re measuring. Even the most emaciated waistline still has some size to it, and therefore, it cannot be zero. Claiming the size of a dress as such is baffling to me- claiming that you’d aspire to be that size, or the implication that you should be that size, is even stranger. Your waistline should be non-existent? Give me a break.

Anyway, I’m getting off topic. My point is this: Confidence has a lot to do with how someone looks. That’s not going to change any time soon. But, it also has a lot to do with how you perceive yourself to look. Change your perception, and even if you don’t shed a single pound, you can believe that you look better. This, in turn, can make you carry yourself better (after all, if you think you’re hot shit, why wouldn’t you? You’re hot shit, after all)- and when you carry yourself like you’re worth a million dollars, other people are more likely to treat you better. At the very least they’re typically less likely to mess with you, because someone who is self-confident is less likely to put up with heinous bullshit.

Enter the small but growing plus-sized movement. This is a movement you might have seen here and there; Glamour had a cover a while back with a bunch of “plus” sized models without Photoshopping, or you might have stumbled onto the Curve Appeal Tumblr, or any other venue that extols the bigger girls. These are good things, in my opinion, because they instill confidence in a group of people whose confidence is more likely to be somewhat eroded from the constant assault on their forms that the media hits them with.

It instills confidence- but not conceit.

There’s a big difference. Confidence is knowing who you are. Confidence is knowing your path and walking it, demanding equality when it is due, and doing your thing with swagger even when the haters go and hate. Conceit, on the other hand, makes you believe that you are better than everyone else, and it makes you believe that you deserve special treatment.

The “plus size is awesome” movement doesn’t go around telling girls that they’re better than skinny girls- which is what a lot of fashion outlets have been telling their readers, albeit in reverse; that skinny is better than big. The plus-size movement has been telling girls that they are at their best when they look like they ought to, not when they try to mash their bodies into a shape eight sizes too small. Is there a difference between being a big, curvy girl and being legitimately unhealthy in your size? Of course, and people need to be real with themselves; if you’re lazy and eat like shit, or if you have a glandular problem (or whatever else), you need to take extra care of yourself. But that’s not what we’re talking about here.

We’re talking about confidence, which could be summed up by the line, “A little swagger is a good thing”. A buddy of mine used to say that. “Modesty is for people who suck” represents conceit, though I say it jokingly (usually). So keep your swagger, people, be you male or female, size 0 (ugh) or size 10.

I Actually Have Something to Say: Clean Coal

So, I promised I had a few ideas bombin' around in my head, and this one's been out there for a while. By now, you've seen the ads about "clean coal", be they positive or negative. Now, to be up-front about all this, I have been raised for the vast majority of my life to believe that the Big Power companies, be they coal, oil, or nuclear, are usually up to something nefarious. While I might not believe that industrial lobbies such as this one are being controlled by a cartoonish Montgomery Burns style villain, I do believe that big businesses of all kinds are resistant to changes which would cause them to lose money in the short term. Thus, even if retooling power plants to run cleaner would produce more money in the long-term, I'm of the opinion that most companies are beholden to their shareholders, who are only concerned with recurring short-term gains.
I bring this up because I want my current biases to be known before I attempt even a minor investigation of the topic. So, that being said, I'll start with a basic overview of just what the hell "Clean Coal" is supposed to be.

Clean Coal is a phrase that's popped up recently as the debate over "green sources of energy" has intensified. The coal industry's claim is that they've invested billions of dollars over the past three decades in environmentally friendly advancements, resulting in a product which is ~77% cleaner as of 2005 than the product that was being sold in the 70's- with an additional six billion currently in the works across mostof the 50 states.
Assuming for a moment that the coal industry is entirely trustworthy and genuinely has our best interests at heart, there is something to be said for coal. The biggest advantage of burning this rock is that there's a whole fucking lot of it right underneath us- an estimated 170 metric gigatons in America alone. To put that number in perspective, a "gigaton" is 10 to the 9th, or one billion (1,000,000,000) tons, and there are 170 of those sitting mostly underneath Pennsylvania and other Appalachian states. Russia's right behind us with 150 gigatons, and so forth. Global reserves of coal, which are about 847 billion tons, should last about 130 years as of today's rate of use. Coal provides about 50% of our nation's power- at least as far as buildings and homes go (can't run a car off of rocks, after all, that's just silly).

Now, one of the things that caught my eye about that "77% cleaner" chart I linked above was that little snippit about how they "did not track emissions of less than 100 tons per year; all other emission figures on this table are reported in thousands of short tons". That seemed potentially dubious. Then I read the graph again-
"The calculations are based on five pollutants: carbon monoxide, volatile organic compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide and particulate matter."
See anything missing?
Hint: Carbon Dioxide. CO2, the primary greenhouse gas. My thanks to the This Is Reality Blog for pointing that out, I originally missed that curious omission the first time I read the chart, probably because I saw the word "Carbon" followed by "something-Oxide".
But let's stick to the topic, here. So, focusing on the five criterea by which the coal industry judges itself, they have dropped 77% of their emissions. Great. But even so that's not all a power plant produces. I'm going to quote the Union of Concerned Scientists here, who say that the average coal plant produces, per year, 170 pounds of mercury. 1/70'th of a teaspoon -OF A TEASPOON!- of mecury can render all fish in a 25 acre lake unsafe to eat. Does anyone know the conversion of teaspoons into pounds? I don't, but thats a lot of fucking fish.
Each plant will also annually produce 225 pounds of arsenic- which will "cause cancer in one out of 100 people who drink water containing 50 parts per billion."
There are ~600 coal-burning plants in the United States today, so... well, I went into Psychology because I'm shit with numbers, but wrap your head around this for a minute. 1/70'th of a teaspoon poisons everything in a 25 acre lake, and with 170lbs per plant per year... multiplied by ~600 plants... that's about 120,000 lbs, or 47.2 tons of mercury.
This is not my amused face: >:|

I just can't get beyond the feeling that "Big Coal" is trying to hide what's really going on; attempting to take up the banner of being "clean and green" as it becomes more and more popular, in a bid to stay relevent in this dramatic new economy. Even so, saying that one has "gone green" implies that there are close to zero greenhouse emissions of any kind, and to date, there is not a single green coal plant in the nation by those standards. And even when posessing technology for scrubbers that would reduce CO2 emissions by 90%, coal companies resist on account of Costing Too Much (under "Who You Calling Cheap?")- claiming that building a 300 megawatt plant with a 90%-capture CO2 scrubber could cost 1-2.5 billion dollars.
But thats about how much normal 300 MW power plants cost!

I understand that companies need to stay afloat, expand, and make money. But at what point do we stop and say "There are more important things than netting shareholders another couple billion this year"?

Props to the following sites for information: FactCheck.org, The World Coal Institute, the This Is Reality blog, America's Power, and last but not least, WE.