Death of a Nemesis

I’m going to miss the newspapers. Except for one year in Vietnam when it was not possible, I have subscribed to a daily newspaper without break since I was seventeen. One of my most vivid memories from plebe year at West Point was the first snow storm. My duty was to go out to the sally port before breakfast and fetch the papers. They were there, so was I. Drifts were four feet deep. The wind howled. I had ice in my nose and ears. For an Alabama boy it was painful but no discomfort was more important than getting those newspapers. I never considered any alternative. There was none.

It was a part of our curriculum to subscribe to a different paper each year; one year it was the Herald Tribune, the next the Journal American, then the New York Times. That’s only three. I don’t remember the fourth. Only the New York Times survived the sixties. I’m not sure how much longer even the Gray Lady will be around.

Newspapers once ruled the world. When we came to North Texas there were two major papers here. The Dallas Times Herald came in the afternoon, and of course there was the Dallas Morning News. We subscribed to them both. They each had their star reporters, and their columnists. It didn’t last long. I suppose TV news got to the Times Herald first. I don’t remember the exact sequence but as best I recall the two papers began combining their production facilities, then their news rooms, and finally the Times Herald was no more. Now I see where the DMN and the Ft. Worth Star Telegram will begin sharing sports coverage. One will follow the Mavericks and Stars, the other the Rangers. For now they will both continue to cover the Cowboys. I wonder for how long. Of my five adult children, only one subscribes to a daily paper. I think we have established a trend.

When I was eleven my dad got sick and was bed ridden for a year. I had never heard of the New York Times but he subscribed to it and read every page. I didn’t understand that at the time but to this day before I get on an airplane I buy a copy and, like my dad, I read every page. And I love to complain about it. The NYT is the epitome of the Main Stream Media. AAAGHH! They don’t report the news, they spin it. When the facts on the ground don’t fit their agenda they report selectively. At last resort they manufacture the news. AAAGHH!

But what’s the alternative? On my second tour in Vietnam I got the Stars and Stripes, not a bad paper but trust me, the NYT is better. So is the DMN, or any major paper for that matter. It pains me to see them in decline. The Detroit Free Press recently announced they will suspend home delivery for all but three days each week. Ouch! I don’t go to Detroit that often but what will I read when I do? USA Today? How long will they last? They don’t even publish a Sunday paper. I’m not about to begin watching the morning TV programs. Internet news is good as far as it goes but I don’t see it replacing my newspaper.

Maybe the newspapers and I are dinosaurs. Maybe a million years from now some three fingered freak of an anthropologist will dig up my grave and wonder what on earth that unwieldy piece of papyrus is that I seem to be scowling at. Whatever it thinks I will have gotten the better of it. I will have enjoyed Dagwood and Blondie and the daily crossword. I will have noticed my friends’ obituaries and gone to their funerals. Most of all I will have enjoyed railing about the Dallas Morning News editorial board. I just hope they last longer than I do.

Some Folks Never Learn

A Dallas Morning News editorial today includes a remark that the relative calm we are now seeing in Iraq “…reaffirms the wisdom that once in a hole, stop digging. The Bush administration finally pivoted with its surge strategy in 2007…” The comment is as gross a mischaracterization of what happened in Iraq over the last two years as it is graceless. The surge represented not a Bush pivot but a doubling down. Critics including the DMN saw it as a stubborn refusal to admit the war was lost. Fortunately Iraqis saw it as renewed commitment and it was they who pivoted. Sunnis turned on Al Qaeda and Shiites got their thuggish militias under control. It was a pivot all right, in a war many in the American media (and some political elites I’m sad to say) were shamelessly attempting to turn into a debacle.

The DMN advocated their own “plan B” that would have almost certainly have produced said debacle. It called essentially for pulling American troops back into their bases and watching the borders from the air while letting Iraqis slaughter each other to their hearts’ content. Joe Bidden, with his much touted foreign policy expertise, contended that Iraqi ethnic groups could never learn to live together and advocated an American imposed partition. That was a strategy that would have led to one of the great humanitarian catastrophes of last fifty years. Barack Obama just wanted out and damn the consequences. One can only imagine the boost in morale Muslim extremists would have gotten from that. That none of this happened is a tribute to Mr. Bush’s resolve. I suspect historians will judge him a bit more kindly than the DMN does.

It’s worth remembering what Iraqi insurgents were trying to accomplish. Al Qaeda saw an opportunity to defeat a super power, as Afghan Mujahideen had a generation earlier. They thought Americans would soon tire of the chaos and leave. A lesser man than George Bush might well have proved them right. Shiite militias were motivated by a combination of power, greed, and revenge. Calmer heads among them including Grand Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani eventually prevailed. Sistani is no friend of the United States but he never liked the idea of Muslims running around killing each other. With the surge and switched allegiances among Iraqis, improving security began to build on itself and make possible the political compromises that may ultimately produce the peaceful Iraq most of us would like to see. At this point that likely includes Messers Obama and Biden. They wouldn’t want to see things go south on their watch.

Much will be written about how all this came about but nobody is likely to study it more closely than the military. They need to get this right. There is one critical lesson to be learned. No foreign insurgency is likely to be defeated as long as countering it is perceived as a predominantly American operation. The turning point in Iraq came when Iraqis began taking responsibility for their own security. Americans can celebrate victory only when they can leave, and leave behind a stable government capable of maintaining order and defending itself. That was always the strategy. It’s been right there on the White House web site since November, 2005. The surge didn’t change that.

The same will be true in Afghanistan, although we’re going to need some serious cooperation from Pakistan. There are some encouraging signs. Pakistan seems to be taking things more seriously and Afghan insurgents are reverting to more primitive tactics as their casualties mount. The key remains however in an emerging Afghan security force. That’s one lesson we had better have learned.

Garbage in Power Out

One of the more interesting technologies to emerge from the last few decades of interest in alternative energy is plasma gasification, or more properly plasma arc gasification. The plasma is produced from an arc of electricity. You can think of it as a controlled and continuous bolt of lightning. It was originally developed by NASA as a means of simulating reentry temperatures for spacecraft. The Army adopted it in the early nineties as a way of destroying hazardous chemicals, especially old chemical munitions. It works because it produces temperatures hotter than the surface of the sun. Any substance on earth exposed to that kind of heat is reduced to its elemental atomic components. The technology can be used to dispose of all sorts of toxic chemicals. It isn’t much help with nuclear waste because radioactive materials are already in elemental form but for things like PCBs it is just the trick.

The plot thickens when we begin to think about what other materials we can break down, and what we can use the byproducts for. As for the latter, extremely hot gasses can be used to drive turbines and produce electricity. Depending on the gasses they may also be used to produce hydrocarbons. Resulting gasoline, diesel, and jet fuels can be readily cleansed of most of the pollutants we usually associate with them. Inorganic residue can be used to produce industrial chemicals or even construction materials. As for what feed stocks might be used, the most obvious choice is municipal waste. You might think the immense heat required would demand more energy than the process would produce but that turns out not to be the case. Once the process begins it produces more than enough energy to sustain itself. The excess has the potential to provide as much as 5% of our electricity needs from the nation’s garbage alone. It could eliminate the need for landfills and there are no smokestacks. The input materials aren’t burned. They are turned into gas in a closed system. There need be no release to the outside air.

The technology seems to be picking up steam. A company called InEnTec demonstrated a system at Port Arthur in June that produces ultra clean synthesis gas from chemical residuals normally treated as hazardous waste and incinerated. InEnTec is planning a commercial facility to produce hydrogen. Dow Chemical has adopted the technology for a plant in Michigan. St. Lucie County in Florida is building a garbage processing plant to replace its landfill and produce 60 MW of electricity at a cost competitive with natural gas. Environmentalists tend not to like it because they say it hasn’t been proven in the US but if these projects turn out to be as clean and economically sound as their backers expect we should see a wave of new construction over the next few years. It has some pretty significant advantages. It doesn’t have the long lead times or waste issues nuclear power has. And the knock on coal gasification is it burns coal to create the temperatures to produce the gas, and generates lots of extra carbon dioxide in the process. The plasma arc doesn’t burn anything. And a solution to the land fill problem should be attractive to every municipality in the country. No more methane emissions, no ground water contamination, no worries about non-biodegradable trash, a built in substitute for expensive re-cycling programs, and no more smelly eyesores in the landscape. What’s not to like?

Of course we’ve heard these promises before and not just from clean coal. This may not work out either for one reason or another. Environmentalists are right that it hasn’t been proved commercially. But sooner or later one of these ideas is bound to work.

Bad Air

One of the more disingenuous arguments in the litany of calamities predicted by global warming enthusiasts is that malaria will advance into regions where winters are now too harsh for the parasite to survive. It is a frightening prospect because today the disease kills more than a million people every year, most of them children under five. It is also a false alarm. The truth is malaria isn’t a disease of the tropics. It is a disease of poverty. It is prevalent today in Equatorial Africa not because it is warm there. It is prevalent because so many people there are too poor to protect themselves.

That was true of the United States as late as the 1940s, though it was as much from ignorance as poverty. It wasn’t until 1890 that we even knew what caused malaria or how it spread. It got its name from Romans who thought it was brought on by swampy fumes. English colonists brought it to Jamestown in 1607 at the height of the Little Ice Age. It quickly spread across the continent. By the 19th century it could be found from Florida to Massachusetts and west through the Dakotas. Malaria doesn’t need warm winters. It needs mosquitoes and unprotected people. As Americans grew more prosperous they installed screens in their windows and doors and the disease began to abate. It persisted in many areas though, particularly in the lower Mississippi Valley where the ground was swampy, mosquitoes everywhere, houses too loosely constructed to provide tight seals, and people often couldn’t afford the screens.

Health officials understood all this and in the late 1940s launched an eradication campaign. Local, state and federal agencies drained swamps and wiped out other mosquito breeding grounds. They also sprayed DDT inside every southern home. The DDT killed other insects as well and people loved it. It was one of the great public health successes of the 20th century.

Then we banned DDT, though it is not an environmental hazard when used inside. It is harmless to humans unless they ingest it. But the ban stopped its use in some areas where it could have done a lot of good. Some mosquitoes developed resistance to the insecticide. Also, we sprayed it on the walls. Many of the homes in today’s most vulnerable areas don’t have walls. New eradication efforts will require some ingenuity. They will also require some common sense. Some environmentalists have belatedly dropped their objections to the responsible use of insecticides; some but not all.

The point is malaria will not return to northern climes unless we lower our defenses. It wasn’t cold that drove it out. It was man. We can drive it out of the rest of the world too, if we just will. There is no need for all those children to be dying. We tried once, but when it was no longer a problem in the developed world, rich nations lost interest. In the 1960s WHO gave it up as a lost cause. It’s getting some renewed attention now. A number of research programs into anti-malarial drugs and vaccines have been funded. International organizations are distributing treated bed nets and currently available drugs in some of the world’s most impoverished areas. President Bush pledged over a billion dollars to the effort. The biggest thing we could do though is to adopt economic and trade practices to help eradicate poverty. A lot of 3rd world swamps still need to be drained. Environmental lobbying will likely prevent 1st world money going into very much of that but once they have the wherewithal people will do it themselves. As long as we keep our own swamps drained, and our air conditioners running, we have nothing to fear from malaria.

Fighting Other People’s Battles

As the war in Iraq winds down and attention shifts back to Afghanistan what little news coverage and think tank analysis there is describes a deteriorating situation. Suicide bombings are up. Convoys are hijacked. The opium trade is brisk. Air strikes are causing too many civilian casualties. Whole sections of Southern and Western Afghanistan and the border regions of Pakistan are safe havens for Taliban, Al Qaeda, and hostile war lords. Allied commanders are begging for more troops.

All of this is true, but the sky is hardly falling. American, NATO, and Afghan forces still win every tactical engagement. That’s why insurgents have reverted to more primitive asymmetric tactics aimed at soft targets. Whenever they mass forces for a conventional attack they are annihilated. Critics are right about one thing though. After seven years we have made far too little progress in building internal Afghan forces to the point where they can stand on their own. That was the mistake we made in Vietnam. We learned from that and that’s why we have been able to begin an orderly withdrawal from Iraq. There is less need for us there now. The same thing will be the key to ultimate success in Afghanistan. There is no way American troops can win this war. The best we can possible do is prevent a total collapse long enough for Afghans to become strong enough to maintain order among themselves and defend against foreign incursions.

There is no reason this shouldn’t happen, and fairly soon. The rebels are not numerous. They are poorly organized, equipped, trained, and led. Government troops and police out score them on every count already. (Excepting possibly leadership, I’m not sure about that.) Afghans justifiably complain about collateral casualties from air strikes but the intentional carnage among civilians inflicted by terrorists is far greater. They aren’t exactly winning hearts and minds.

It seems to me it’s important to remember why we are still there. It isn’t to find and kill every terrorist. That would be impossible. It’s to prevent a recurrence of the chaos that brought the Taliban to power in the first place. We can’t afford to be seen as having “lost” in Afghanistan, but victory should be defined as leaving behind a self sustaining government. The longer this is seen as an American war the more difficult that will be. If there is one thing we should have learned about Muslims over the past six decades or so, it is that they resent any interference by non-Muslims in their affairs, no matter how well intentioned, even when justified in self defense. Muslims can slaughter each other to their hearts’ content and elicit no more than a collective tut tut from the community at large. If Jews or Christians are involved they react with outrage.

I’m not sure the current plan to send in more combat troops is such a good idea. I would rather see a focus on building up Afghan self defense capabilities. The sooner this is recognized as an internal Afghan problem the better. That won’t happen as long as Americans are doing most of the fighting. I don’t really understand why we haven’t made more progress in this regard. Afghanistan has been far quieter than Iraq. We’ve had years to get this organized. There ought to be a steady pipeline of Afghan troops and police coming on stream. By now we should be pulling troops out, not sending in more.

I hope somebody is asking hard questions. What’s the plan? What exactly is it that more troops are supposed to accomplish? What’s been the hold up with Afghan forces? What’s going to change? Hasn’t that been NATO’s responsibility? They don’t seem to have been much help. Why are we even still part of that alliance?

Wrong Side of the Argument

The Greens are going to lose their fight with coal. For one thing their story is wrong. Coal is a lot cleaner than it used to be and newer technologies are about to make it cleaner still. More importantly, coal is the only available source for the worlds increasing energy needs over the next couple of decades. Oil won’t support the growth from China or India. Wind and solar certainly will not. And only coal can free us from dependence on petroleum imports any time soon. Coal’s only real problem is carbon dioxide and that’s only if you buy the man made global warming argument. People increasingly do not. They are for sure not prepared to wreck the global economy in a futile attempt to avoid it.

The case for coal is compelling. If you insist on low CO2 emissions it can be sequestered and stored underground. People claiming it has never been tested commercially are either poorly informed or not telling the truth. Since 2000 Dakota Gas has been piping CO2 from a coal gasification plant to a Canadian oil field for use in an enhanced recovery project, the largest in the world. In the future CO2 could be used as feed stock for algae farms, maybe even in greenhouses. A better idea is to use nuclear power for heat to gasify the coal. That could take CO2 emissions back to the level of the 1960s, produce hydrocarbons at costs competitive on today’s market, provide an ample supply of electricity, and make the US a net energy exporter all at the same time.

Diesel is the cleanest liquid fuel on the market today. Diesel powered cars get 30% better mileage than gasoline and more than twice that of ethanol. Since 2006 we have phased in low sulfur diesel at a substantial price penalty but South African diesel made from coal is cheaper and has less than a third the sulfur. With congress about to enact ever stricter mileage and emissions standards diesel will make more and more sense, but we need to get the price down. Coal is the way to do it. If we pair coal with nuclear we could power the world for the foreseeable future until better technologies come along, and do it far more cleanly. Dirty coal indeed!

It might even be a way to make all those wind and solar farms useful. The rap on them is the electricity they provide is not only expensive, it’s unreliable. While the wind is blowing and the sun shining they could be used to power coal gasification plants and produce natural gas. The natural gas could be used for standby power. There are even some promising technologies out there for using wind and solar to produce hydrocarbons from CO2 and water. That’s a few years down the road and we’d have to be careful. Plants won’t survive in air depleted of CO2. I’m not in favor of this until it becomes economically viable but if we insist on throwing public money at “renewables” we might as well get something in return.

Greens are an important constituency for Barack Obama and for Democrats in Congress, but a lot of Congressional Democrats are from coal states. They know the economy runs on cheap fuel and despite their rhetoric they recognize the limitations of “alternative” energy. They also like being reelected. They will toss the greens a bone or two with some big time subsidies but they realize the nation has to get its fuel from somewhere and they know coal is the only real place to get it. Obama’s proposed Energy Secretary is a Nobel Prize winning physicist who worries about both anthropogenic climate warming and nuclear waste disposal issues. I suspect he also knows we have got to have real answers for serious short term needs. If we don’t get them Obama will most likely be a one term president. He wouldn’t like that. Neither would the greens.

Red Got it Right

If you look up Leif Erikson’s father you may well read that the discoverer of Greenland scammed his fellow Vikings with false promises of a hospitable place. He lied to get them follow him as colonists. The name was part of the scam. It’s a persistent libel. The truth is the earth was relatively warm place in 985 AD when Erik the Red founded his settlements. Greenland was as he described it, blessed with inviting fjords and fertile green valleys. Climatologists now call the time the Medieval Warm Period. Some call it the Medieval Climate Optimum because European agriculture fared better with higher rainfall and a longer growing season, and because a lot more people die in cold snaps than in heat waves. Some refer to it as the “so called” MWP because the occurrence suggests the current warming trend may not be all that unusual. There is little question mean and median global temperatures were a degree or so higher than they were a few centuries earlier or later. Whether temperatures in the 20^th century were even warmer is a matter of intense scientific conjecture. In any case the Viking settlements in Greenland survived for 500 years, until about the time the Little Ice Age began.

Being more recent, the LIA is a bit better documented. Spanish Explorers saw snow covered mountains along the California coast. The winter George Washington spent at Valley Forge was famously cold. The Hudson River regularly froze over as far south as New York City. Glaciers around the world were growing. Mountain villages in the Alps were engulfed with ice. Eskimos were spotted paddling kayaks off the coast of England. But precise measurements of temperatures around the world are hard to come by.

Determining global mean and median temperatures from ice cores, tree rings, and ocean sediment is an inexact science at best but a group from the Oregon Institute of Science surveyed the literature on the subject. They concluded most of it supports the .contention that there was indeed a warm climatic anomaly from about 800-1300 AD, a cold climatic anomaly between 1300-1900 AD, and the 20^th Century was probably not the warmest on record. All three conclusions apply to most geographic regions of the world. The historical record contains no reports of global warming catastrophes. None of this is good for today’s alarmists because the medieval period certainly predates the industrial revolution. Any warming could not possible have been caused by man made carbon dioxide. And warmer temperatures don’t seem to have done any harm. They were a good thing. Increased levels of CO2 have quite beneficial effects as well. Trees grow faster over a wider geographic range.

Given all this it’s safe to say the climate for the past 3000 years or so has been punctuated by periods of relative warmth and cold. But the accuracy claimed for the infamous hockey stick graph published by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the graph Al Gore used to dramatic effect to demonstrate the trend in man made global warming, is questionable at best. We are talking about a science that only recently has been able to say with any confidence what global temperatures are today, let alone what they were a millennium ago. Even current measurements are challenged by many as misleadingly high. Recording stations tend to be located in urban areas and affected by “heat islands.” We are also talking about differences of maybe 1 °C, a change most people in a crowded room wouldn’t notice. We are trying to project those differences into parts of the world where there are no reliable records, using a science in its infancy. All we know for sure is that Erik the Red got a bad rap.