Recently in Administration Category

Let us not praise the Hummer, but bury it - and hope the urge to drive monsters like it stays buried

THE UNDERWHELMING state of the American auto industry, both the poor sales and atrocious management, have clobbered the emotions.

One wants to feel something at the impending demise of the Hummer, especially for the 3,000 American autoworkers who face unemployment, but that behemoth was never built to engender sympathy.

Rising gas prices and the global financial crisis meant that the Hummer's end was nigh. In February, the Chinese government's refusal to back Sichuan Tengzhong Heavy Industrial Machinery's bid to buy the brand from General Motors- for a paltry $150m (€109.3m) - was a serious blow.

About five tonnes, getting 15 miles/gallon and tough to manuever on urban streets, the humongous vehicle was created in the mid-1980s as the US Army's replacement for the jeep.

Officially known as the High Mobility Multipurpose Wheeled Vehicle (HMMWV), it was quickly nicknamed "The Humvee" by soldiers, and in 1992, a street-legal version of the Humvee, renamed the Hummer for civilians, was introduced.

"This car was like the high-fructose corn syrup of automobiles, something that concentrated everything bad about motoring until it underwent a phase-change and somehow became an object of desire," author and columnist Cory Doctorow wrote about the Hummer, but Christopher Bateman, writing for Vanity Fair magazine, said it better: "The Hummer, as a means of civilian transportation, was just about the dumbest car in the world."

And it is hard to feel sympathetic about something like that disappearing.

Perhaps it is a symptom of the times, but it seems like nobody tries to save their cash anymore

THE KINGDOM of Saudi Arabia has repeatedly made statements to the effect that the nation should be financially compensated if it loses oil revenues because of reduced petroleum consumption that results from climate-change programs.

Some experts believe that this is a stalling tactic by the Saudis, in an effort to confound the upcoming December climate talks in Copenhagen.

"Oil exporters have always, in my view, far overblown the near-term effects of carbon limits on demand for their products," David Victor, professor, School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California, San Diego, told The New York Times in early October.

"For the Saudis this may be a deal-breaker, but the Saudis are not essential players [in the upcoming climate summit]... One sign that a climate agreement is effective is that big hydrocarbon exporters hate it," Victor said.

Be that as it may, most entries in the media have been covering this story as if they had trouble deciding whether to file it in the business section of the newspaper or the "Weird But True" column.
Not that you can really blame them - it is a story that leads to a level of outrageousness.

The introductory paragraph from this Associated Content item certainly sets a tone:
"If the world community actually comes to a climate change agreement that involves cutting dependence on oil, one country intends to demand a bailout. That country is not an impoverished, third world nation."

Then, the author editorializes in a way that would make most journalists jealous:
"The idea of the Saudis demanding a financial bailout seems to be brazen beyond belief."

Stories from Reuters and The New York Times were more sober in tone - no editorializing, plenty of quotes - and that's when a lot of this story sounds bonkers:

"We are among the most vulnerable countries, economically," Saudi negotiator Mohammad Al-Sabban told Reuters in April.

In October, he said in The New York Times, "Assisting us as oil-exporting countries in achieving economic diversification is very crucial for us."

In 2008, Saudi oil revenue increased by 37% from 2007 to $281bn, (€189bn) says Saudi Arabia-based Jadwa Investment.

Somehow it's better to think of a town being wrecked by local boys instead of feds


Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, like most locals, I've known of the toxicity of the Gowanus Canal since I was a kid.

But I'm still not sure if I want it to be turned into an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site.

It is always for the best if companies are responsible enough to clean up their own messes before they become a problem, but lawsuits and massive class actions are a good way to coerce responsible parties to clean up their messes - but I just don't know if I want the feds to muck about the 'hood.

With Superfund status, an area is then "toxic" in more ways than one: any investment will leave; and private, public, city and state efforts towards restoring this waterfront will have to cease.

Then the search for "potentially responsible parties" for the EPA to sue will begin among the 1,500 previous property owners in the Gowanus area. Nothing will get done for a long time.

It is much different when you know the neighborhood where it's going to happen: this isn't Chicken's Knuckle, Nowheresville! To my knowledge, there are several quaint establishments for the quenching of a thirst near the Gowanus, and an old roommate's band use to record near there.

Don't get me wrong, the Canal is gross, absolutely disgusting - but it used to be much worse.

An industrial and transportation hub since the 1860s, the Gowanus Canal had a pump installed to clear it in 1911, and that kept the channel relatively clear. Enough so, that in 1952 a shark swam up the Gowanus - until the NYPD shot it. No lie.

In 1961, the pump was broken, supposedly by a manhole cover dropped on it by an angry city employee, and was not repaired until - dig this - 1999.

While industry in the area eventually died out, years of run-off from smelters, coal dumps, ink plants, foundries, gashouses and paint factories had done their work.

The wooden pilings and bulkheads along the creek have absorbed so much weirdness that it may be too complicated to remove them.

The situation is exacerbated when the rain is heavy: the sewers flood, then sewage overflow into the Canal.

But progress is happening, and if the EPA puts the Gowanus on its National Priorities List in March, that might end.

Discounting the environmental concerns that demand this--and there may be some valid ones--it might actually be good if Americans did not use such soft toilet paper

ALTHOUGH IT only accounts for 5% of the US forest-products industry, environmentalists have been raising a stink about the US toilet paper (TP) industry for quite a while.

According to an article in a late-September edition of The Washington Post, environmental groups have been, for several years, protesting the cutting and grinding of sometimes centuries-old trees for something they consider frivolous at best.

"They want Americans, like Europeans, to wipe with tissue made from recycled paper goods," writes article author David Fahrenthold.

Extra-soft and plush TPs are "like the Hummer product for the paper industry," Allen Hershkowitz, senior scientist with the Natural Resources Defense Council told The Washington Post. "We don't need old-growth forests... to wipe our behinds."

Generally, however, TPs for the "away from home," or "no-choice" market, like in restaurants, offices and schools, use about 75% recycled fiber.
Softer, "plusher" TP brands must be made from virgin wood--new wood has the longer fiber strands needed to make a "more comfortable" TP, while recycled paper does not.

But on the whole, consumers won't budge.
And I, for one, can't blame them.
You can have my plush TP when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!

Revolutionary fervor

It was the typical polyglot gaggle of anarcho-whateverists parading through the US city of Pittsburgh during the latest G-20 Summit in late September that brought TP to mind.

While I have always enjoyed unguided mobs wrecking a place as a televised spectator sport, it has always bugged me how protests in the US seemed so unfocused.

A gazillion agendas, a lot of noise, but for what? A lot of overtime for the police, and a bigger heap of bad press for whatever the initial cause had been.

Whatever your cause, how is it helped by a man wearing a rainbow Afro wig holding up a "John 3:16" sign?
Not that that sentiment isn't appreciated, though.

It was the early 1980s, and in response to a then-recent Central Park protest for some now-forgotten cause, my junior year of high school English teacher told our class how to have an effective protest:
Get everyone attending to dress neatly all in black, like they were at a funeral; have a few signs and a banner so people know why you're there; and then stand outside the dean's office or wherever in stone silence.

If a notorious busybody and nanny-state proponent like New York's hypocritical Mayor Mike Bloomberg decided that it would be for everyone's best interests to ban "too soft" TP, it would get a protest like that, I'm sure.

RED ALERT: The "Cash for Clunkers" program is being shut down on Monday, August 24, 8pm EST, according to news reports.

As such, the essay below is now essentially quite dated. However, it may be regarded as part of the national discourse about this program.
Something for the history books, y'know....

ON JUNE 25, US President Obama signed the Consumer Assistance to Recycle and Save Act (CARS), more colloquially known as "Cash for Clunkers."

The program began operating in late July and is scheduled to end November 1.

What "Cash for Clunkers" does is offer consumers up to $4,500 towards trading in older gas guzzlers. The trade-in must be less than 25 years old, that is, made after 1984--so your 1960s and 1970s gasoline inhaling land yachts are ineligible--and get 18 miles/gallon or less.

This bribe--excuse me--incentive is not really to convince consumers to purchase hybrids or vehicles with better fuel economy.

According to an ICIS colleague, who wished to retain his anonymity:
The point of the program is NOT to get people to purchase hybrids, or even very efficient traditional cars, mainly because the American car companies have so few of them. That's why the standard for the replacement cars is so low: 22mpg.
Quite simply, the program is intended to get people spending money again, (with the threshold set deliberately low to qualify plenty of US models), since consumer spending is 70% of the economy, and car sales are a very large--if not the largest--portion of that.

But more importantly, the 18/22,mpg differential is so small that environmentally, and energy-wise, it's probably NOT worth doing, when you consider the energy embodied in the manufacturing of the cars (both the old one and then new one) themselves.
If you go out and buy compact fluorescent light bulbs (CFL), do you then replace (and destroy) all the incandescent ones? No. You wait until the incandescent ones die, then replace them. Or at least, replace only the most-used bulbs in your house, and save the incandescent ones for places where it doesn't make much sense to use an expensive CFL, like in the closet, where, because the light is on just a couple of minutes per day, you would NEVER recoup the high cost of the CFL through energy savings. (The car analogy to this is relegating the big gas guzzler to weekend trips to the hardware store, or for use only for shorter trips around town, while someone else is using the more efficient one for longer trips.)


The government originally allocated $1bn (€707.5m) to the program, but that was gone in about one week, with roughly 245,000 transactions taking place. But you do not get the money then and there at the car lot, nor do you get it placed towards a purchase.

According to some web commentators, the consumer must put the money up front and then the dealer will apply for a rebate. Meanwhile, the dealer cannot get the rebate until the vehicle is rendered inoperative (more on that in a moment).

Ford Motor, Honda and GM say that because CARS has been so popular they will increase production to meet demand, which is great for chemical companies that supply the auto makers.

But "We have crammed three to four months of normal activity into a few days," said Jeremy Anwyl, CEO of car buying guide Edmunds.com, in an editorial for The Wall Street Journal. "What everyone fails to realize is that once the backlog is met, interest in the program will fade."

A few things bug me about CARS, with the first stemming from jealousy:
I use public transportation and my wife drives a car with great fuel economy, but is old.
So for us? Zero.
But my taxes still get used for this. Great.

Secondly, the motor of the old "clunkers" must be rendered inoperable, destroyed essentially--which means there's no recycling going on besides melting now-useless engines into slag.

Meanwhile, parts for older cars--because some people are not going to turn in their cars--will be more difficult and expensive to find.
Unless owning certain cars becomes illegal--but I better shut up about that: I don't want to give anyone any ideas.