First Post

Welcome to my new blog. I hope to write down whatever thoughts I find interesting, which usually have to do with environmental and climate issues, and perhaps a touch of economics and politics.

I heard a lecture by the visiting professor Matthew Kahn yesterday about the environment and economics. They seem to be intertwined into almost everything I hear here at UCSB, and they are very closely intertwined in the real world in negotiations such as COP15. This whole idea of discounting that Chris Costello was talking about last week, in that we value things more now than later, is an unfortunate truth that allows us to conveniently not adequately prepare for the future, and possibly have a real psychological and economical excuse to screw over future generations in what we do in this world. It is not the intention of anyone to do this, but we are naturally short-sighted, and people are extremely hard to mobilize any sort of preparation en masse, especially given the complications of everything involved in the real world. I think the United States culture as a whole with credit card debt, lack of retirement funds, federal deficit, and the attitude toward climate change mitigation, speaks to a general societal problem of getting ahead in the world at all costs, at the expense of disastrous potential long-term problems.

I read an interesting article about a new branch of a company called FloDesign, which now is generating venture capital for creating much more efficient wind turbines that are effectively jet engines. Although this is a great idea in concept, I highly doubt that they will be cost competitive with traditional large turbines, despite being tremendously more efficient. The only advantage I see is that they work in areas that get tremendously windy, and would otherwise damage traditional wind turbines, creating a potential for harnessing extremely high rates of energy during these peak periods. If you stuck one in Antarctica, where the wind is regularly 100mph, they would probably work great. I get tired of seeing all these theoretical alternative energy ideas, such as novel wind and solar energy collectors. My general opinion is we need to do a lot less thinking, and a lot more building. No amount of thinking is going to solve our nation's energy problems, but investing in our electricity grid, and real wind turbines sure will. There's a general impression that they are prohibitively expensive, and it is not true. As the Cape Wind project off Massachusetts has proven, it in unfortunately the litigation that seems to be the death of so many of these projects.