Year: 2013

The Fracking Divide, Ctd

by Doug Allen

A reader corrects me on the EPA’s ability to regulate fracking:

Your desire to “see the EPA start looking into ways to eliminate leakages where it is “technologically and economically feasible,” whether below the surface or above” is a nice thought, but not actually legal.  Under the Energy Policy Act of 2005, Congress passed the “Halliburton Loophole,” which prohibits the federal agencies in charge of environmental protection from regulating hydraulic fracturing under any of the major environmental statutes – the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, the Safe Water Drinking Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, etc.  So while EPA has the authority to commission studies on health impacts, such as it is currently undertaking, that is about as far as its legal authority extends.  In order to do anything further, let alone “eliminate leakages,” it would need Congress to close the loophole and extend authority to regulate in this area.

Duly noted. I’ll amend my desire to have Congress first close the loophole (which as far as I can tell is a horrible piece of special interest legislation) and then have the EPA do everything possible to eliminate leakages. Another reader highlights fracking’s water usage:

Fracking uses A LOT of water. Colorado’s snow pack currently stands at less than 73% of average and it is where the majority of the Front Range’s (Denver, Boulder, Loveland, Fort Collins, Colorado Springs, etc) water comes from. Local farmers can usual rent water for around $35 an acre foot. Some people are already getting quotes of over $200 an acre foot for the upcoming summer. Fracking companies have money to burn and the local farmers don’t. Last summer set records for sustained high temperatures. They are forecasting more of the same this summer. It’s going to get ugly.

Just for some context on my energy background, my views on natural gas are heavily informed by my past work as an energy consultant in California, working primarily on long-term resource planning for the electricity sector.

One of the first things I learned from my experience working with regulators, utilities, energy companies, and stakeholders was that there are no easy solutions. Every proposed solution has its advocates and opponents, and the “best” energy future is highly dependent on what you find important. People who focus on cost will reach a different conclusion than those who focus on reducing emissions, who will reach a different conclusion than those who are opposed to big transmission lines traversing the state. My opinion of natural gas is based on my belief that it provides the best balance between the various concerns I’ve heard. But there are plenty of arguments that can be made for alternatives.

Is It Time To Retire Romeo And Juliet?

by Brendan James

Commenting on a new adaptation, Alyssa Rosenberg complains that the play “hasn’t aged well”:

[T]he vision of Romeo and Juliet’s deaths uniting their families is an adolescent fantasy of death solving all problems, a “won’t they miss me when I’m gone” pout. There’s a reason that, in the best modern riff on Romeo and Juliet, West Side Story, Maria lives after Tony’s death to shame the Sharks and the Jets, her survival a seal on the truce between them. Dying is easy. Living to survive the consequences of your actions and to do the actual work of reconciliation is the hard part.

Anna Williams suggests the exploration of “deeply childish love” is the point of the play:

The play’s criticism of the lovers becomes explicit in the speeches of Friar Laurence, who considers their relationship shallow, hasty, and immoderate. Amazed at the news that Romeo has suddenly stopped loving Rosaline and fallen in love with Juliet, the friar concludes that “young men’s love then lies / Not truly in their hearts, but in their eyes.” (Just as Rosenberg says, “Romeo’s age isn’t specified in the play, but the quickness with which he throws over a former flame for Juliet doesn’t suggest a particularly mature man.”) A love that lies more in the eyes than in the heart, in the friar’s analogy, is deficient.

The rapid progress of the lovers’ relationship worries the friar, too: “Wisely and slow, they stumble that run fast,” he cautions the eager Romeo. Although Juliet calls their love “too rash, too unadvised, too sudden” the night that she meets Romeo, she does not actually slow their courtship, as they marry the very next day. We are, in Rosenberg’s phrase, watching them “behave like early teenagers.”

I agree with Alyssa that most modern-dress productions don’t come off well—I haven’t been the same since sweating through a bleak, grey staging at Edinburgh Festival a few years back. But is the play itself really “outdated?” Probably not until self-destructive love is out of our system. In the meantime it seems odd to fault Shakespeare for the relatively recent butcherings of a drama that has been staged for roughly 400 years.

A Terminal Career Path

by Brendan James

Rebecca Shuman declares that “the tenure track literature professorship is extinct,” and urges all aspiring grad students to turn back while they still can:

Other well-meaning academics have already attempted to warn you, the best-known screed in this subgenre being William Pannapacker’s “Graduate School in the Humanities? Just Don’t Go.” But this convinced no one. It certainly didn’t convince me! Why? Because Pannapacker is a tenured professor. He pulled it off, so why can’t you? After all, someone has to get these jobs.

Well, someone also has to not die from small-cell lung cancer to give the disease its 6 percent survival rate, but would you smoke four packs a day with the specific intention of being in that 6 percent? No, because that’s stupid. Well, tenure-track positions in my field have about 150 applicants each. Multiply that 0.6 percent chance of getting any given job by the 10 or so appropriate positions in the entire world, and you have about that same 6 percent chance of “success.” If you wouldn’t bet your life on such ludicrous odds, then why would you bet your livelihood?

Making Telework Work

by Doug Allen

Jeff Robbins, founder and CEO of Lullabot, defends Marissa Meyer’s ban on telecommuting. His rule of thumb is that a “conventional company with several remote employees is a company with several alienated employees”:

My feeling is that most conventional co-located companies simply don’t know how to manage, and more importantly, how to include their remote workforce. … This discussion isn’t all about productivity. It’s also about culture, relationships (both romantic and platonic), understanding office politics, in-jokes, birthday parties, and general inclusion. Without these things, a company’s work-at-home staff won’t feel like they’re part of the team. … Feeling alienated sucks. These employees can become myopic, focusing only on the work that comes to them via email and nothing else.

He explains how they maintain the office camaraderie despite their “distributed” workforce:

[I]t’s built into our DNA to avoid remote worker alienation. We bend over backwards to make our team feel connected and involved in the company. Being a good proactive communicator is a requirement for any job at Lullabot. And our company’s infrastructure is built around facilitating many different types of communication. We can easily and quickly see who’s working at any given moment. We can easily get quick answers from anyone on the team whether they’re online or off. We can post questions company-wide for discussion. We spend a lot of time on conference calls, but people are often multitasking and we rarely feel like a meeting was unproductive.

Previous Dish on working from home here, here and here.

14 Bald Eagles Who Are Still Outraged Over Benghazi

by Chas Danner

The NRCC is going listicle for its new website:

The committee spent hours poring over BuzzFeed’s site map and layout, studying how readers arrived at its landing pages and bounced from one article to the next. Unsurprisingly, a ton of traffic came from social media — but a lot of it also seemed to come from the site’s sidebar, said Lansing. So the NRCC’s redesign includes a list of recent and popular posts. Other changes include shorter posts, fewer menu items and a heavy helping of what now passes for social currency on the Web: snark. The new site comes a few months into the beginning of a broader strategy to capture more of the social Web’s attention. To that end, the NRCC has begun dropping blog posts with headlines like “13 Animals That Are Really Bummed on Obamacare’s Third Birthday.”

Pareene pounces:

If an audience exists for a BuzzFeed of the right, BuzzFeed will happily be the BuzzFeed of the right, because capitalism. In fact, they are already producing cheap viral crap for conservatives to like on Facebook. Recent attempts include What It Feels Like Being a Conservative on the Internet, which went viral but was deemed “fail” by the BuzzFeed community, and “7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About if Bush Had Done Them,” which was voted both “win” and “fail.” The author of that latter piece, Benny Johnson, was hired (from Glenn Beck’s the Blaze) basically explicitly to create viral conservative content.

Waldman is underwhelmed:

So let’s head on over to the NRCC web site and prepare to be amazed. Up top of the site, we’ve got…an opportunity to co-sign the Ryan budget. Skapow! Are you feeling buzzed?!? Below that there is “8 of Our Favorite Martin Luther King, Jr. Quotes,” which does show that the brain trust at the RNC figured out the list thing. But it’s not exactly jumping out of your computer and grabbing you by the lapels.

Ask Dreher Anything

by Chris Bodenner

This embed is invalid

Long-time readers of the Dish know Dreher well. But for everyone else:

Rod Dreher was a conservative editorial writer and a columnist for The Dallas Morning News, but departed that newspaper in late 2009 to affiliate with the John Templeton Foundation. He wrote a blog previously called “Crunchy Con” at beliefnet.com, then simply called “Rod Dreher” with an emphasis on cultural rather than political topics. … Raised a Methodist, he later converted to Roman Catholicism in 1993. He wrote widely in the Catholic press, but covering the Roman Catholic Church’s child sex abuse scandal, starting in 2002, led him to question his Catholicism, and on October 12, 2006, he announced his conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy.

You can follow Rod’s writing at his blog at the American Conservative. He also has a new book out, The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life:

[The book] follows Rod Dreher, a Philadelphia journalist, back to his hometown of St. Francisville, Louisiana (pop. 1,700) in the wake of his younger sister Ruthie’s death. When she was diagnosed at age 40 with a virulent form of cancer in 2010, Dreher was moved by the way the community he had left behind rallied around his dying sister, a schoolteacher. He was also struck by the grace and courage with which his sister dealt with the disease that eventually took her life. In Louisiana for Ruthie’s funeral in the fall of 2011, Dreher began to wonder whether the ordinary life Ruthie led in their country town was in fact a path of hidden grandeur, even spiritual greatness, concealed within the modest life of a mother and teacher. In order to explore this revelation, Dreher and his wife decided to leave Philadelphia, move home to help with family responsibilities and have their three children grow up amidst the rituals that had defined his family for five generations – Mardi Gras, L.S.U. football games, and deer hunting.

Some praise for the book:

“If you are not prepared to cry, to learn, and to have your heart cracked open even a little bit by a true story of love, surrender, sacrifice, and family, then please do not read this book. Otherwise, do your soul a favor, and listen carefully to the unforgettable lessons of Ruthie Leming.” — Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love

“The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is Steel Magnolias for a new generation.” -Sela Ward, Emmy Award-winning actress and author of Homesick

To submit a question for Rod, simply enter it into the above Urtak survey after answering all of the existing questions (ignore the “YES or NO question” aspect and simply enter any open-ended question). To vote, click “Yes” if you have a strong interest in seeing him answer the question or “No” if you don’t particularly care. View the results here. Thanks for your help.

Cool Ad Watch

by Chris Bodenner

seth-taras_history_know_normandys

EDW Lynch has details:

Photographer Seth Taras created then and now composites out of famous photos of momentous historical events for the 2004 “Know Where You Stand” ad campaign for the History Channel. The campaign was orchestrated by the Ground Zero ad agency and included four tv spots.

Hydrogen Resurgent?

by Doug Allen

Stephen Webster points to new hydrogen fuel research:

Researchers at Virginia Tech announced Thursday that their latest breakthrough in hydrogen extraction technology could lead to widespread adoption of the substance as a fuel due to its ease of availability in virtually all plant matter, a reservoir previously impossible to tap. The new process, described by a study in the April issue of the scientific journal Angewandte Chemie, uses a cocktail of 13 enzymes to strip plant matter of xylose, a sugar that exists in plant cells. The resulting hydrogen is of an such a “high purity” that researchers said they were able to approach 100 percent extraction, opening up a potential market for a much cheaper source of hydrogen than anything available today. …

The rise of such an alternative fuel could seriously disrupt the pollution-producing industries that run on oil and natural gas, and potentially spark a new industrial emphasis on growing plants with high levels of xylose in their cells. The environmental benefits of that potential future are twofold: the plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, helping in small part to address the climate crisis, and the resulting portable fuel only outputs water when burned.

Less than ten years ago, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles (HFCVs) were touted as the solution to the transportation sectors fossil fuel woes. The electric car was dead, while Governor Schwarzenegger announced the development of a statewide hydrogen refueling infrastructure to help spur the hydrogen car’s transition to a commercially available vehicle. At the time, I wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on the costs and benefits of Schwarzenegger’s plan, arguing that the high cost of both the cars themselves and the pathways for producing hydrogen fuel made it unclear that the future for HFCVs was any brighter than that for electric vehicles.

Hydrogen technology failed to improve, while advancements in batteries resurrected hopes for the electric car. Now there’s an electric car commercially available (though it’s not cheap) and hydrogen has largely faded from the alternative fuel discussion.

This newest finding is a step in the right direction, but I’m not ready to call it a “gamechanger” for the transportation sector yet. The experience in the early ’00s showed that there’s a significant difference between technologies that seem nearly ready for market (like the HFCV) and technologies that can actually be brought to market (like the Tesla Roadster). I look forward to tests of this new technology on a larger scale, and declines in the cost of HFCVs themselves, but I’m not holding my breath.