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Roger Cohen Sees Hitler In The Desert

Well, we all see mirages, I guess. But it says something about the hysteria about the latest incarnation of the Sunni insurgency in Iraq that we’re suddenly comparing them to Nazis and to non-humans. Even as Cohen himself acknowledges that “the Nazi death machine was unique. Facile invocation of it is too frequent, belittling the phenomenon and its victims.”

So why break Godwin’s Law so egregiously? Cohen wants us to believe, channeling Martin Amis and Primo Levi, that there was no “why” in the unconscionable unique act of the Holocaust. And yet, mountains of evidence explain exactly why: it was a function of a vile racism that regarded the Jewish people as vermin that needed to be exterminated in order to allow the master race to flourish. It was not some random act of mass murder; it had a grotesque but clear and constantly trumpeted rationale. Then Cohen seems to endorse the idea that the Nazis were somehow unhumans or “counter-humans”, in Levi’s words. But that too, it seems to me, lets them off the hook. The Holocaust was a deeply human act – a function of humankind’s capacity, revealed throughout history, of extraordinary levels of hatred and violence, brought to new and unfathomable evil in the age of the industrialized state.

And equally, it is absurd to argue that “there is no why to the barbarism of ISIS.”

This is after Cohen actually produces a long litany of reasons for ISIS’s brutality and evil, mind you, none of which he deems sufficient to explain the ISIS propaganda beheadings he watched on video. But why should we not take the Islamists’ word for it? They are committing slaughter and rape and attempted genocide for one core reason: because God demands that they slaughter infidels. Their mandate is beyond any human one but results in so-very-human evil.

Again, you’d think, reading Cohen, that this has never happened before. You’d think that genocide was invented by the Nazis. You’d think that religious slaughter was invented in the last couple of months. And all of this is designed to hype even further the propaganda behind this war without end, without providing any actual strategy for doing anything that could possibly alter the onslaught, or in some way win it.

And so we have the final cry of the liberal interventionist:

“Leave it to the Arabs, it’s their mess, they can clean it up,” is an inadequate (if understandable) response to ISIS. It would have been the wrong one. President Obama’s coalition in the war to eradicate ISIS may be flimsy but passivity was not an option.

And then he equates them with the Nazis yet again. The point of this facile invocation is simply to scream: Something Must Be Done. No war based on that vague slogan has ever ended in anything but disaster. But here we go again …

Ebola On The Move

The disease poses a limited threat to America, but Michael Osterholm anticipates it spreading to other parts of Africa:

We know how the disease will likely spread in the months ahead.

Each year, thousands of young West African men and boys are part of a migratory work population not too dissimilar from U.S. migrant farm workers. Crop-friendly rains wash over West Africa from May to October, forming the growing season. These young men typically help with harvesting in their home villages from August to early October, but afterward head off for temporary jobs in artisanal gold mines in Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger and Ghana; cocoa nut and palm oil plantations in Ghana and Cote d’Ivoire; palm date harvesting and fishing in Mauritania and Senegal; and illicit charcoal production in Senegal, Mali, Cote d’Ivoire, Ghana, Burkina Faso and Niger.

This migration is about to begin, even for young men whose villages have been recently hit by [Ebola virus disease (EVD)]. These workers find daily laborer jobs at $5 per day, half of which they remit to their families back home. Like their ancestors before them, they use little-known routes and layovers through forests to avoid frontier checkpoints. They usually have ECOWAS ID cards, providing free passage to all the member states of the Economic Community of West Africa States. It takes one to three days to travel from the EVD-affected countries to these work destinations. There is no need for Ebola to hop a ride on an airplane to move across Africa: It can travel by foot.

He wants massive international mobilization against Ebola:

The first critical mistake public-health officials often make amid such outbreaks is failing to consider another black-swan scenario. At the moment, they are focused only on meeting the vaccine need in the three affected countries. If this virus makes it to the slums of other cities, the epidemic to date will just be an opening chapter. Africa contains more than a billion people, and is growing faster than anywhere else in the world. If world leaders don’t make it a priority now to secure up to 500 million doses of an effective Ebola virus vaccine, we may live to regret our inaction. It’s that serious.

Securing 500 million doses of an effective Ebola virus vaccine is going to require a partnership between government and vaccine manufacturers that puts it on the same footing as our response to an emerging global influenza pandemic. This will require mobilizing people and resources on a massive scale—it has to be the international community’s top priority.

Follow all our Ebola coverage here.

(Map from Julia Belluz)

The NYT’s Guru Of “Re-Purposed Bovine Waste”

Every now and again you come across a quote that tells you everything you need to know about what’s going in journalism. It’s from the New York Times’ pioneer of native advertising/sponsored content/brand journalism, Meredith Kopit Levien. Her blather about deceiving readers into believing they’re reading journalism when they’re actually reading advertising was brilliantly skewered by John Oliver over the summer. Now over to Joe Pompeo:

Levien watched the clip for the first time the next day with Times publisher and chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who encouraged her to have a good laugh over it.

“I think John Oliver is hilarious, and I think he did the most clever take one could have on the risks and downsides of native,” Levien told me a month later during an interview in her glass-enclosed 19th-floor office with enviable Hudson River views, though she admitted: “It was my first experience with random people tweeting negative things at me.”

Her rebuttal? “The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model. And I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.”

Let’s look at that quote a little more closely, shall we?

The best way to preserve editorially independent, high quality journalism is to preserve the business model.

But the NYT is not “preserving” the business model. If it were, Ms Levien would not have a job. The NYT would be relying on advertising as it always has – and clearly distinct from its editorial side. She was brought in explicitly to change the business model, by fusing advertising and editorial so that it becomes increasingly hard to tell the difference between the two, and thereby to get higher rates from advertisers. She was brought in to sell the newspaper’s core integrity for revenues. Then this:

I think the idea of branded content that shares a form factor with editorial is a great first step.

How does a person who speaks English translate that? “Branded content” is what we once called advertising. “Shares a form factor with editorial” means an advertisement designed to look as much like editorial as possible. So let’s put this in English:

The best way to preserve expensive journalism is to change the business model so that corporations will buy advertisements at higher rates because we promise to disguise them as editorial.

And that, one realizes with a shudder, is just a “great first step.” I wonder what the second one will be, don’t you?

Neither Cracking Down Nor Backing Down

Authorities in Hong Kong and Beijing appear to be eschewing another attempt to forcibly disperse the island’s massive student-driven protests, which grew in numbers today as China held its national day celebrations, but they won’t negotiate with the demonstrators either. Peter Ford reports that the government is banking on the movement wearing out its welcome with the public:

They have withdrawn almost all policemen from the protest areas, where the atmosphere is relaxed. A protracted national holiday means that the strikes blocking streets in four spots around the city will not disrupt much until next Monday. … Government supporters expect the crowds to disperse if the protests continue into next week and prove to disrupt the city’s normal life. Polls have found that Hong Kongers are pretty evenly split over the merits of the government’s plans for political reform, and over how they regard the “Occupy Central” movement.

But with the protestors demanding that Chief Executive Leung Chun-ying resign by tomorrow and threatening again to occupy government buildings, the situation could easily come to a head again soon. Heather Timmons and Lily Kuo pass along a harshly-worded editorial in a party-line newspaper and worry:

Not only is Beijing unwilling to reconsider the August decision to allow only Communist Party-approved candidates to run for Hong Kong’s highest office, but Hong Kongers who continue to participate in the protests should expect dire consequences, an editorial in the People’s Daily newspaper warned today. Some activists and analysts, including a former Tiananmen student leader, say the piece bears a marked similarity to a notorious editorial that ran the People’s Daily more than 25 years ago. That piece was later blamed for leading to the brutal crackdown on demonstrations, which killed hundreds or thousands, depending on estimates.

Chris Beam checks out protester-police relations and finds them surprisingly cordial:

Most protestors I spoke with sympathized with the plight of the police. “They don’t want to hurt any Hong Kong citizens,” said Andy Loh, 25, a travel guide whom I found near a barricade outside the police headquarters. “They just listen to their bosses.” Icarus Cheng, a 30-year-old financier, said he had friends on the force who had been working nearly straight for the previous 30 hours. “They’re suffering,” he said. “Of course, we are too.” Part of the problem is that, while Hong Kong has plenty of protests, they rarely occur on this scale, and with the outcome so unpredictable. “Policemen don’t have much experience handling this situation,” he said.

The police don’t seem especially offended by the protesters either. “They’re nice,” said a youthful officer who was guarding the headquarters on Tuesday. He said that some students have offered him and his colleagues food and drinks, which of course they have to refuse. (A similar thing occurred at the Tiananmen Square protests in 1989, and some hungry officers accepted.) I asked what he thought of the movement overall. “Freedom of speech,” he said.

Jessica Chen Weiss reflects:

Even if foreign governments stay out of the public fracas, it is unclear whether peaceful demonstrations will compel Beijing to do more to abide by past promises to grant “universal suffrage upon nomination by a broadly representative nominating committee in accordance with democratic procedures,” as stated in Hong Kong’s mini-constitution, the Basic Law. Indeed, China has offered Hong Kong more than any other city under its jurisdiction: universal suffrage. But protesters in Hong Kong have rejected what they see as an ultimatum from Beijing, demanding a more democratic nomination process.

Whose move is next? Commentators have painted Xi Jinping into a corner: Back down and be seen as weak, or stand firm and be seen as reneging on “one country, two systems.” With Hong Kong protesters depicting Chief Executive C. Y. Leung as a vampire with fangs, and pro-Beijing media smearing Hong Kong activists as U.S. and British accomplices, the outlook for “gradual and orderly progress” toward a more democratic Hong Kong appears bleak.

Fisher doesn’t discount the possibility of another Tiananmen-style massacre:

That would seem unthinkable, given the global backlash that image-conscious China would face for using force in a city full of foreigners and foreign media. But perhaps the most essential eternal truth for understanding China’s government is that the ruling Communist Party prioritizes the preservation of one-party rule way before anything else, including the outrage of the entire world, to the extent that it will sacrifice just about anything to maintain the system. The world has changed a lot since 1989, and so has China’s role in it, but it was also true in 1989 that Beijing was full of Western journalists and China knew it would pay heavily for massacring protesters, but did it anyway.

Gwynn Guilford surmises that “China’s leaders may think they have little to lose by cracking down even harder on protesters—and less to gain by reversing their ban on universal suffrage in 2017”:

Any compromise on that point might stoke similar demands from the four other territories and countries that the People’s Republic claims: Macau, Tibet, Xinjiang, and Taiwan. … The fact that students in Taiwan are aligning with the Hong Kong demonstrators—and that Ma Ying-jeou, Taiwan’s generally pro-Beijing president, is supporting them—threatens the Communist Party’s policy of “reunification.” Meanwhile, an insurgency in Muslim-dominated Xinjiang is quickly gathering momentum. Of course these are the reasons China’s leaders might think they should maintain a hard line. There are plenty of ways that violence in Hong Kong could hurt the mainland.

Richard C. Bush III points out that income inequality has also played a role in driving discontent in the territory:

On the economic side, income inequality in Hong Kong is among the highest in the world. According to Forbes’s rankings, Hong Kong has forty-four billionaires, which is the highest in the world once population is taken into account. Young people believe, with some justification, that they will not be able to secure a standard of living that is as high as their parents. A key reason is the control that a small number of property firms have over the real estate market, which raises prices for both residential and commercial space. For many couples, owning even a small apartment is increasingly out of reach. Moreover, competition for jobs has intensified as the flow of smart, eager applicants from China grows. The divide between the One Percent and The Rest continues to deepen. In most advanced societies, democracy provides a check against excessive wealth and market concentration. Not in Hong Kong.

Finally, Jay Ulfelder expresses some cautious long-term optimism, noting that “this uprising was not born last Friday”:

The longer arc of this challenge includes a much wider array of methods and spaces, including this summer’s referendum and the marches and actions of political and business elites that accompanied and surrounded them. … Based on patterns from similar moments around the world in recent decades and the Communist Party of China’s demonstrated intolerance for popular challenges, I continue to anticipate that the ongoing occupations will soon face even harsher attempts to repress them than the relatively modest ones we saw last weekend. Perhaps that won’t happen, though, and if it does, I am optimistic that the larger movement will survive that response and eventually realize its goals, hopefully sooner rather than later.

(Photo: Thousands of protesters gather outside the Hong Kong Government Complex on October 1, 2014 in Hong Kong, Hong Kong. By Chris McGrath/Getty Images)

We War-Loving Americans

Aaron Blake highlights a new poll showing rising public support for Obama’s ISIS strategy:

The newest WaPo-ABC poll shows 50 percent approve of Obama’s handling of the Islamic State, as compared to 44 percent who disapprove. That’s an improvement from August, when the question referenced only Iraq and not Syria, and 42 percent of Americans gave Obama a vote of confidence. Obama’s new polling heights come as Americans overwhelmingly approve of the airstrikes he ordered in Syria. Seven in 10 Americans (70 percent) support the airstrikes — up from 65 percent in early September. His decision to send American forces to train Iraqi troops and coordinate airstrikes against the Islamic State in that country is less popular, but still gets positive marks: 53 percent support and 44 percent opposition.

Drum is dismayed at how comfortable we are with going to war yet again:

According to polls, nearly two-thirds of Americans are on board with the fight against ISIS and nearly half think we ought to be sending in ground troops. That’s despite the fact that practically every opinion leader in the country says in public that they oppose ground troops. At this point it would take only a tiny shove—a bomb scare, an atrocity of some kind, pretty much anything—and 70 percent of the country would be in full-bore war frenzy mode.

It’s like we’ve learned nothing from the past decade. Our politicians are in love with war. The public is in love with war. And the press is really in love with war. It just never ends.

Larison rejects at least one of Drum’s conclusions:

I don’t see much evidence that the public is “in love” with war. Yes, there is currently majority support for the administration’s decision to attack ISIS from the air, but there is reason to believe that this support is shallow and likely to evaporate as the war drags on. According to at least one survey, most Americans also consider ISIS to be a “very serious” or “fairly serious” threat to the U.S., and that simply isn’t true. This false belief has inflated public support for action against ISIS, and that is going to wear off over time. Far from being “in love” with war, a better way to think of the public’s reaction is that they have been whipped into a panic about a vastly exaggerated threat by irresponsible fear-mongers. Most Americans support the current intervention because they wrongly think it is necessary for U.S. security, and they have been encouraged in that wrong view by their sorry excuse for political leaders.

Linker sees the entire 2016 field subscribing to war love:

From the president and Hillary Clinton on through a long line of possible Republican candidates, no one likely to be involved in the 2016 race for the White House seems inclined to diverge from the militaristic consensus that dominates official Washington and plays so well in the American heartland. It’s war-lovers everywhere you look. Very much including when the American people look at themselves in the mirror.

Ebola Makes It To America

As we noted yesterday, a man who flew from Liberia to Dallas has been diagnosed with Ebola. Kent Sepkowitz examines the precautions we’d taken:

The Dallas case is breaking some of our ironclad assumptions. The CDC has a well-considered algorithm that places those returning from the three endemic West Africa countries—Sierra Leone, Guinea, and Liberia—into a measure of extra vigilance if and only if the person has had exposure to a known case of Ebola. Per the press conference, the Dallas case had no such exposure. He was not a health-care worker treating patients, nor was he from a family battling active disease. Of course, more facts may emerge that contradict today’s story—but today’s facts, if they hold up, mean that yesterday’s assumptions are no longer correct. Liberia may indeed be enough of a hotbed of Ebola that anyone arriving from the area will need to be considered for extra vigilance.

Ezra recommends calming down and taking the quiz seen above:

On average, Guinea spends $32 on health care per-person, per-year. Liberia spends $65. Nigeria spends $94. The United States spends $8,895.

That money buys trained health workers, disease investigators, isolation wards, fever screening, protective gear, and much more. That money buys advanced hospitals all across the country, and labs that can quickly test for the disease, and the ability to do contact tracing and follow-up visits on a tremendous scale. That money also buys public-health officials with long experience combatting infectious diseases — both here and in other countries.

Susannah Locke imagines best and worst case scenarios:

The best-case scenario for the United States is that a patient traveling from West Africa realizes that they might possibly have Ebola as soon as they start feeling sick. Everyone else makes sure not to come in contact with this person’s bodily fluids. And the outbreak ends with just one patient. Hopefully, that’s how this Texas case will end.

The worst-case scenario, meanwhile, is that an Ebola patient comes to America, is ill for days, and comes in contact with a lot of people before anyone realizes that something unusual is going on. That would be much worse. But even in that case, it’s still much less likely that Ebola will get farther one city or town. “I don’t think we’ll have a serious public health threat in any of the developed countries,” Osterholm told mein July. The real problems are for countries like Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone that don’t have the resources to contain the outbreak quickly.

Margaret Hartmann explains the next steps in our response:

The challenge now is to find everyone the Dallas patient came into contact with and begin monitoring them as well. The “contact tracing” process is how Nigeria managed to eliminate its Ebola outbreak. After identifying one Ebola patient who arrived at the Lagos airport in July, Nigerian officials were able to find 72 people he might have infected. By tracing their contact, they found a pool of 894 people potentially infected with Ebola. Eight people died, including the first patient, but the rest have been cleared.

CDC director Thomas Frieden, like the White House, has urged Americans to stay calm. Abby Haglage summarizes his statement. An important part:

Asked how many people the patient came in contact with, Frieden estimated fewer than five. “Handful is the right characterization,” he said. “We know there were family members who came in contact, and there may be other community members, but we will cast the net wide.”

And Olga Khazan cracks open the history books:

At arrival gates, border protection officers keep their eyes peeled for passengers who show signs of fever, sweating, or vomiting. They also try to confiscate any monkey meat or other bushmeat that passengers might have in their luggage.

In some ways, our approach to keeping scary diseases outside of our borders hasn’t changed much since the Middle Ages. As Defense One‘s Patrick Tuckerexplained, when the Black Death was mowing down Europeans, the Doge of Venice instructed so-called “Guardians of Health” to board arriving ships and check the crew for inflamed lymph nodes. Those considered suspect weren’t permitted to dock for 40 days—quaranta giorni. Ever since, “quarantine” has been the way to keep newer plagues from spreading once they reach our shores.

Update from a reader:

You lauded the role HealthMap played in breaking the news of Ebola outbreak before WHO. From Kalev Leetaru’s article you highlighted: “Much of the coverage of HealthMap’s success has emphasized that its early warning came from using massive computing power to sift out early indicators from millions of social media posts and other informal media.” Unfortunately, that is not quite accurate. HealthMap is not quite a “success” here, as you can see from this Foreign Policy story.

Making Cents Of Hong Kong

While the ongoing protests are primarily about political freedoms, Matt O’Brien observes that the island has “already seen what being subsumed by the mainland means economically. And it’s had enough of that”:

It’s true that China’s growth has been good for Hong Kong’s—especially their retailers—but it hasn’t been as good for their relative standard of living. Not only have the richest mainlanders caught, or even surpassed, them, but now those Chinese are pushing up their cost-of-living and snatching up everything from their stores. That’s why Hong Kongers say the mainlanders are “locusts” who come in, take everything, and then leave—and with bad manners, too. Indeed, it set off a social media firestorm this year when a mainland parent was caught letting their two year-old urinate in one of Hong Kong’s streets. In other words, it’s the same old story of old money versus the nouveau riche.

But Yglesias attributes Hong Kong’s recent economic slump, which may also play a part in driving the protest movement, to the absence of these rich mainlanders:

Economic weakness in Hong Kong in part reflects a broader slowdown in the Chinese economy, which seems to be no longer capable of sustaining ultra-fast growth rates. But Hong Kong has a particular problem because of an ongoing decline in luxury goods sales that appears to be linked to a Chinese government crackdown on corruption and conspicuous consumption. … Hong Kong is pretty much the closest you can be to mainland China without being subject to mainland China’s luxury taxes. Consequently, the island is crawling with upscale malls with large mainland client bases. Lately, those customers have been staying away, and it’s dragging Hong Kong’s economy down.

William Pesek considers what the demonstrations mean for the economic futures of the island and China itself:

As I’ve pointed out before, China should be learning from Hong Kong’s first-world institutions. It should emulate the laissez-faire ethos, rule of law, open capital accounts and free-wheeling media environment that underpin Hong Kong’s success — not stamp them out. Instead, Xi’s government appears to be intent on remaking Hong Kong in China’s deteriorating image. If Beijing continues to erode the liberties and institutions that have made Hong Kong such a great place to do business, multinationals aren’t suddenly going to shift base to Shanghai. Indeed, by the time the mainland’s favored hub reaches Hong Kong’s current level of transparency and financial sophistication — if it ever does — all the banks and household corporate names would’ve already moved to Singapore, or elsewhere in the region.

Mohamed El-Erian agrees that China’s decision to double down on repression will likely backfire economically:

Indeed, the Chinese government is likely to prevail over the Occupy Central movement in Hong Kong. But in doing so, it will probably be inclined to slow certain economic reforms for now, seeking instead to squeeze more growth from the old and increasingly exhausted model — similar to how Brazil’s government responded to protests there ahead of the World Cup a few months ago. And while this would be part of a broader political strategy to defuse tensions and avoid an immediate growth shock to both China and the global economy, it would undermine the longer-term economic vibrancy of both.

The Natural Gas Hype, Ctd

A reader writes:

Good piece overall, but I want to point out this sentence: “Brooks Miner adds that ‘natural gas does have a dark side: It is composed primarily of methane, which has a much stronger climate-warming effect than carbon dioxide.'” That’s misleading without context. Methane is, indeed, a potent GHG. But it only has this impact if it is allowed to escape, unburned, directly to the atmosphere. If it is burned completely, it becomes CO2 and water like any other fuel. So the global warming impact of used methane is equal only to its carbon content (which is lower, per unit of energy, than petroleum). It is only leaked methane that has this “dark side” – and since we should be economically averse to wasting fuel through leakage anyway, it’s only a problem when something goes wrong.

The other thing to note is that leaked methane will only circulate for a few decades because it will naturally combust in the atmosphere and degrade to CO2. So while its immediate impact is high, it won’t have the same centuries-long effects as a commensurate amount of carbon emission.

Another goes into greater detail and more:

It’s worth clarifying that the reason we should be worried about natural gas‘ (methane’s) relative radiative forcing is not because of its use in combustion for power generation, but because of potential leaks. When combusted, it leads to fewer emissions per kilowatt-hour than coal. The study Leber quotes found there was no difference between assuming 0% and 3% leakage, so while this is not something we should totally ignore, it’s not likely to have a huge effect.

The item from The New Republic conflates a few different studies, and in my mind, makes the future for natural gas sound more dire than it really is. They cite this study in Environmental Research Letters to say people will increase their usage, and then the EIA chart which shows no decline in coal use. But the finding in the study to which Leber points is much more nuanced.

First, they note that “across a range of climate policies, we find that abundant natural gas decreases use of both coal and renewable energy technologies in the future.” Leber focuses on the decreased renewables, but there is a reduction in the amount of coal used. This is worse than a future in which we go heavy on renewables, but better than a future in which we go heavy on coal.

More importantly, though, is the following from their abstract: “Without a climate policy, overall electricity use also increases as the gas supply increases.” The thrust of that article as I read it, rather than being simply pessimistic about natural gas future, is rather the importance of climate policy in achieving real gains.

And this is where it gets trickier. As the authors of the article note, “Some analysts have noted that natural gas may complement and support variable renewable energy technologies such as wind and solar by providing flexible back-up power that can ramp up quickly. The model we use, MARKAL, is not well-suited to evaluating the potential for this relationship because it does not represent the details of dispatch, unit commitment, and other short-term facets of grid operation.”

As the study that you posted about in July notes, one of the biggest problems that we have going forward is that “the technology we need to succeed may exist, but most of it hasn’t been proven to scale sufficiently.” To meet any sort of goals, we need to figure out a low-carbon baseload resource (nuclear, coal with carbon capture, something) and figure out a way to design the power system to cope with the challenges of high renewable penetration. As page XI in the deep decarbonization report reports, these technologies are still developing. A renewables-only future isn’t yet realistic… the question is, in the short- and long-term, how can we maintain the reliability of the electrical grid and promote the deployment of more renewable technologies while balancing with (very real) concerns concerns about the cost of doing so and continuing worldwide development. I think that natural gas, as part of a broader climate policy, has an important role to play in getting to that future.

By the way, discussion about the promise of solar wouldn’t be complete without a mention of this new energy storage project opened by SoCal Edison recently. These kind of projects will be hugely important for our ability to ramp up the amount of solar and / or wind in our electricity mix, whatever kinds of cost advancements are being made.

(Disclaimer: the US team for the Deep Decarbonization report was mostly my colleagues from my old job. So that provides some of the background from which I draw.)

Update from a reader:

Your reader said that methane leakage is only a problem “when something goes wrong” but studies show it is a large and constant problem with natural gas extraction:

Drilling operations at several natural gas wells in southwestern Pennsylvania released methane into the atmosphere at rates that were 100 to 1,000 times greater than federal regulators had estimated, new research shows.

Using a plane that was specially equipped to measure greenhouse gas emissions in the air, scientists found that drilling activities at seven well pads in the booming Marcellus shale formation emitted 34 grams of methane per second, on average. The Environmental Protection Agency has estimated that such drilling releases between 0.04 grams and 0.30 grams of methane per second. . . .

The researchers determined that the wells leaking the most methane were in the drilling phase, a period that has not been known for high emissions. Experts had thought that methane was more likely to be released during subsequent phases of production, including hydraulic fracturing, well completion or transport through pipelines.

Bill McKibben agrees: “Up to 5 percent of the methane probably leaks out before the gas is finally burned.” Importantly, the livestock industry is responsible for 37% of methane pollution. Anyone who cares about the environment should eat plants.

And another:

I’d like to add some observations about methane’s role as a greenhouse gas. Your post correctly notes that methane has a role as a greenhouse gas only if it is leaked prior to combustion. It’s even more restricted than than that. Its role depends heavily on where the leakage takes place. I suspect the amount of gas that actually ends up in the atmosphere as methane is wildly overestimated.

Methane is highly digestible. It is essentially snack food for a wide variety of bacteria, particularly soil bacteria. The vast majority of natural gas pipes are buried several feet underground, in environments where these bacteria are widespread. Gas leakage which occurs at a slow rate from subsurface piping is very likely to be metabolized by those bacteria (and thus converted to carbon dioxide) before it ever makes it to the ground surface.

There’s an analogy for this that’s widely known in the environmental cleanup business that I work in. Gasoline leakage from subsurface pipes and tanks is a widespread problem. Given the ubiquity of the problem, you would expect to find gasoline vapors (especially the more volatile constituents like benzene) infiltrating into buildings all over the place. But in practice, this infiltration is quite rare. Why? Because soil bacteris eat the vapor-phase benzene before it gets a chance to move up toward the ground surface. By comparison, methane is far easier for bacteria to digest than benzene is, so it is very likely that subsurface methane leaks are not a big issue.

How Do You Enforce An Abortion Ban? Ctd

Readers comment on these controversial tweets from NRO’s Kevin Williamson:

In this country, even the most vile criminals are entitled to lethal injection. Why hanging? Is that not how the theocracy in Iran hands out its moral judgments?

Another:

I consider myself strongly pro-choice, but I do have to give Williamson props for at least being logically consistent in his beliefs, which is more than I can say for 99% of pro-lifers. If one makes the assertion that a fetus has the same right to life as any human being, it logically follows that the termination of that fetus should be treated under the law like every other homicide. And, under current law, this would mean that a woman who paid a doctor to perform an abortion would be participating in a “murder for hire”, which in many states is a capital offense.

Punishing only doctors is a tacit admission that a fetus IS different in some respects from living, breathing human beings. But, of course, nothing would turn this country more in a pro-choice direction than deciding to punish women in this manner. Which is why it will never happen, and why the pro-life rhetoric regarding personhood will never match up with reality.

Another digs into Williamson’s past:

Here’s his typical pattern.

He’ll write a column or publish a Tweet making some statement that is both literally true, yet also outrageous and offensive to anyone but hardcore cultural conservatives. Thus, his column mansplaining that transgendered person Lavern Cox is “not a woman” is both literally true—Cox was born with a Y chromosome, and presumably the equipment that comes with it—and offensive because he uses that truth to ridicule Cox’s gender identity. Or his column equating a black boy protesting in Ferguson with a “primate”, since it’s literally true that humans are primates, and yet pretends to ignore the centuries of racist depictions of African Americans as sub-human apes. (Added bonus, he invoked the Constitution’s Three-Fifths Compromise when he described the boy as “a three-fifths-scale Snoop Dogg”, which would mean Snoop stands 6 feet, 7 inches tall, but sure, he didn’t mean anything racist, it was just a coincidence and he didn’t check the math before publishing the article.)

Williamson disavows animus, but it drips from his columns, trolling readers who understand he is writing about more than literal truths. “But wait,” NRO readers demand, “Cox is NOT a woman! Humans ARE primates! Why is the truth so offensive to you leftists?” But read the comments to his articles, which are full of disdain and disgust for the subjects he describes, and you see that they get his subtext.

As an added bonus, he can later republish the repugnant tweets he receives in response to his “truths” – including calls for his death – as “liberal intolerance.” I believe he has even recycled attacks into subsequent columns about liberal intolerance. He wins all the way around: his readers love his attacks on the lefties; he outrages the lefties; he gets more fodder for his “conservative as victim of political correctness” worldview.

Which brings us to his latest. If you view abortion as murder, and if you support the death penalty for murder, you’d naturally support hanging every mother who’s had an abortion, right? What other course is there? Do you really believe he’s trying to make a reasoned point, as opposed to trolling abortion rights supporters? Wait for his reposting outraged and vile tweets from people offended by this argument, but don’t hold your breath for the reasoned policy explanation for why it’s a good idea to hang women for having abortions, or how it would play out in reality, or why only women should be hanged and not also the men who impregnate them, because I doubt it will come.

Nature Is Free

Well, that’s not quite right. But as of next month, the journal’s sister publication Nature Communications will be. In light of the news, The Economist deems the rise of open-access academic publishing “unstoppable”:

All seven of Britain’s research councils, for example, now require that the results of the work they pay for are open-access in some way. So does the Wellcome Trust, a British charity whose medical-research budget exceeds that of many scientifically successful countries. And by 2016 every penny of public money given to British universities by the government will carry the same requirement.

Elsewhere, the story is the same.

In 2013, after years of wrangling in America’s Congress, the White House stepped in to require federal agencies that spend more than $100 million a year on research to publish the results where they can be read for free. Countless universities, societies and funding bodies in other countries have similar requirements.

Publishers, though they have often dragged their feet, are adjusting. This week the oldest, the Royal Society, and arguably the most prestigious, Nature Publishing Group (NPG) – both based in London – joined in. Each will now publish a journal that readers do not have to pay to look at.

Fiona Rutherford lauds Nature‘s move:

Receiving over 1,500 submissions a month, Nature Communications is one of NPG’s fastest growing titles. It first launched in 2010 as a digital journal, publishing both subscription content and open access. Last year, the Thomson Reuters’ Journal Citation Report ranked it third among all multidisciplinary science primary research journals, behind the multi-disciplinary Science and Nature. … For researchers who choose not to publish open access, quality is usually their main concern. Therefore, the decision for Nature Communication to fully embrace the idea by offering more options is a huge step in the right direction for the progression of scientific communication.