Jay Reding.com

The Economist look at Al Gore’s claim that he’s effectively “carbon neutral” and determines that it’s all a sham:

Most carbon offsets seem to work on one of a few principles: they plant trees, invest in renewable energy sources, or pay someone in a developing country to use some less-polluting technology, like a CFL.

It turns out that a lot of websites have already devoted quite a lot of space to discussing why these plans don’t work particularly well. Calculating one’s carbon output, and the carbon savings from various offsets, is very tricky and may be manipulated by unscrupulous offset firms. Trees take quite a long time to get to the stage where they are actually absorbing all that carbon—and tend to die shortly thereafter, releasing all that carbon back into the atmosphere, there to wreak havoc. By legitimating carbon usage, offset companies may actually be increasing it.

But surprisingly few make what, to me, seems like a more basic point: energy is a tradable market good. It is not as if there is some fixed demand for energy, so that by using less carbon-emitting energy, you actually decrease the amount of carbon emitted.

Gore’s not even close to “carbon-neutral.” It’s not physically possible to consume as much as he does and plant enough trees to make a difference. It’s all a way of deflecting the very well warranted charges of hypocrisy being leveled against him.

Here’s an example of someone who is living in an environmentally responsible manner:

The 4,000-square-foot house is a model of environmental rectitude. Geothermal heat pumps located in a central closet circulate water through pipes buried 300 feet deep in the ground where the temperature is a constant 67 degrees; the water heats the house in the winter and cools it in the summer. Systems such as the one in this “eco-friendly” dwelling use about 25% of the electricity that traditional heating and cooling systems utilize. A 25,000-gallon underground cistern collects rainwater gathered from roof runs; wastewater from sinks, toilets and showers goes into underground purifying tanks and is also funneled into the cistern. The water from the cistern is used to irrigate the landscaping surrounding the four-bedroom home. Plants and flowers native to the high prairie area blend the structure into the surrounding ecosystem.

Whose house is being referred to? None other than President Bush’s Crawford, TX ranch, which was designed to fit into the native ecosystem and use as little resources as possible.

Gore, the environmentalist crusader is less personally responsible in terms of ecological impact than the man that environmentalists hate with the fire of a thousand suns. That ought to give Mr. Gore some pause.

Ultimately, if someone wants to take the position of demanding that everyone cut down, they’d better not do it from their palatial estates and their private jets. If being environmentally conscious means anything, it has to start from those who are are touting it.

Two interesting pieces on the Giuliani campaign, the first coming from New York Magazine. They take a look at the conventional wisdom and find that all the ink about Giuliani having no chance doesn’t quite seem to hold:

Once the rest of the country sees Giuliani up close, the conventional New York wisdom once held, his campaign will surely fold. So far, exactly the opposite has happened. The more Rudy has put himself out there, the higher his numbers have climbed. Last week, a CBS poll showed Giuliani leading McCain by a whopping 21 points while a Quinnipiac survey found Giuliani running five points ahead of Hillary nationally, and dead even in blue states.

Yes, Rudy is the new horse in the race and thus, for now, the most compelling. Much of his popularity comes from the fact that he’s entered the race just as McCain’s ties to George Bush’s Iraq policy threaten to render his once inevitable nomination stillborn. At the same time, an idea has taken root that the 70-year-old Arizona senator, cancer survivor, and former POW, who would be the oldest person ever elected president, won’t be up to the job.

Giuliani’s pro-war stance and his moderate social-issue positions may yet bury him. So could a lack of money, a green campaign staff, his thin political résumé, his trifecta of marriages, and, not least of all, the fact that the 9/11 card, however powerful it is, could simply prove too flimsy to carry him all the way to the White House. With 21 months to go before Election Day, there’s still more than enough time for McCain to reassert himself—or any number of other scenarios to play out that don’t involve Giuliani’s becoming president. Still, no Republican presidential candidate in modern history has held this big a lead a year out and not scored the GOP nomination.

Believe it or not, America’s Mayor could be America’s next president.

It seems that the more exposure Giuliani gets, the better he seems to look. The question is why: and I think it comes down to something more than just being “the President of 9/11″.

It’s a reader of Andrew Sullivan’s that seems to understand what’s going on here:

Democrats have made an enormously stupid bet about the Republican Party: you can see it in their blogs. They have told each other that we were sure to nominate Elmer Gantry and go to the country with a Bush Clone like George Allen. They have sworn, up and down, that Rudy could not get the nomination. Someone like Kos or Josh Marshall will never, ever get this about us - we are an extremely pragmatic group of people who like to win and aren’t willing to lose just because liberal bloggers and the Media say we should lose.

Authenticity vs. inauthenticity. That’s the story of 2008. Rudy is real. You can touch and feel the Catholic kid from the Neighborhood. You know that some of his friends died in the Towers. Rudy is real. McCain has sometimes tossed away his authenticity he earned the hard way, and let’s face it, he’s not in the best of health. Romney is not quite authentic but Lord how he tries.

I think that’s exactly it. For all Rudy Giuliani’s many faults, there’s one thing that he is not and that is inauthentic. He could have tried to spin his way out of his own positions on civil rights for gay couples, firearms, or abortion. He hasn’t. He went to Sean Hannity and said what he believes.

And yet, conservatives seem to be embracing him.

It’s that authenticity that is Giuliani’s biggest asset against anyone of any party in the field. Hillary is as made-up as they come — she’s like a politicized, feminized Barbie. Barack Obama is the same thing — he’ll be what you want him to be but one is never quite sure what he really stands for beyond all the bobble-headed platitudes. Edwards — well, putting the blow-dried trial lawyer in front of the former federal prosecutor would be like putting a show dog in front of a pit bull.

Why would evangelicals support someone who seems so hostile to their beliefs? For one, Giuliani isn’t all that hostile. His personal pro-choice convictions are matched by his desire to restrain the judicial activism of the Supreme Court by appointing judges who will follow the principles of the Constitution and not legislate social policy from the bench. He’s not for gay marriage rights, but civil unions. His personal foibles may be troublesome, but the very essence of evangelical thought is that we are all sinners in need of redemption.

Evangelicals can support Giuliani for the reason the rest of the Republican Party appears to be embracing him — because he’s honest and forthright in his affairs. That’s a principle of evangelical Christianity that Giuliani has in spades, and it may be enough to win over those who would otherwise be skeptical about his candidacy.

It’s far too early to say that Giuliani (or anyone, for that matter) is truly a “front-runner.” A campaign that has been building momentum for months can die in a heartbeat and underdogs can become leaders of their party just as quickly. However, it’s important not to discount the value of Giuliani’s innate authenticity in this race — especially against the current field. In politics, perception matters as much as anything, if not more than anything. The American people have seen Giuliani provide leadership in a time of profound crisis, and they’ve seen someone who is unafraid to speak his mind and put his ideas out there without the need to spin and obfuscate.

Giuliani is very much in play, and I’ve the feeling that the more the media tries to marginalize him as having no chance in the early primaries, the more many conservatives will want to support him.

The Dow plummeted today, following the mass selloff in the Shanghai markets. The Chinese markets, which have been growing at unsustainably high rates over the last few years are now beginning to see a restoration of economic equilibrium, which is sending shockwaves across the world financial markets.

I’ve argued before that the Chinese economy is not going to grow forever, and this may be an indication that the China bubble is bursting. The Chinese have some deep structural problems in their banking system that could make things even worse for them. The Chinese economy is in many ways similar to the Japanese economy before their major economic downturn.

In many ways, this is reminiscent of the October 27, 1999 “mini-crash” that also originated in selloffs in the Asian market and eventually spread to the rest of the world’s financial markets. Despite that crash, the US was largely unaffected and the US economy continued to do well. Hopefully this “mini-crash” will follow suit.

The fundamentals of the US economy are still solid, but this is another reason why policymakers can’t kill the goose that laid the golden egg. Things like tax hikes, protectionist measures, or increases to regulation all make the US economy more prone to international effects rather than less — and if that happens, it could mean that another downtown in the Chinese economy could have lasting harmful effects for the US economy.

The New York Times has a fascinating piece on environmentalist pioneer Stewart Brand who is advocating a fusion of environmentalism and high-technology to mitigate the effects of climate change and other environmental woes:

Stewart Brand has become a heretic to environmentalism, a movement he helped found, but he doesn’t plan to be isolated for long. He expects that environmentalists will soon share his affection for nuclear power. They’ll lose their fear of population growth and start appreciating sprawling megacities. They’ll stop worrying about “frankenfoods” and embrace genetic engineering.

He predicts that all this will happen in the next decade, which sounds rather improbable — or at least it would if anyone else had made the prediction. But when it comes to anticipating the zeitgeist, never underestimate Stewart Brand.

…He is now promoting environmental heresies, as he called them in Technology Review. He sees genetic engineering as a tool for environmental protection: crops designed to grow on less land with less pesticide; new microbes that protect ecosystems against invasive species, produce new fuels and maybe sequester carbon.

…He’s also looking for green nuclear engineers, and says he feels guilty that he and his fellow environmentalists created so much fear of nuclear power. Alternative energy and conservation are fine steps to reduce carbon emissions, he says, but now nuclear power is a proven technology working on a scale to make a serious difference.

I think that Brand’s environmentalism is far more sustainable than the “Learjets for me, but not for you” hypocrisy of people like Al Gore. Realistically, the idea that everyone can be “carbon neutral” is a fallacy. For one, not everyone can afford to buy “carbon credits” and even if they could, those “carbon credits” are hardly based on any scientific exchange.

What Brand proposes to embrace a version of environmentalism that’s truly progressive — using advanced technology like nuclear power to create a more environmentally friendly economy. We need power, and while efficiency continues to increase, we can’t escape the laws of physics. Electric or hydrogen-powered cars don’t help the environment if the power they need comes from the same CO2-belching coal plants that we use today. With nuclear waste, the end products are contained. Spent fuel recycling is a proven technology — the French have done it for years. The Chinese are investing heavily in nuclear research, including putting hundreds of megawatts of new nuclear plants online in the next few years.

If we want to reduce our CO2 emissions, we can’t do it buy buying indulgences, we have to get serious about fixing the problem. Nuclear energy is the only viable solution we have. We can supplement our nuclear production with wind, solar, and other technologies, but none of those can replace the energy-generating power of nuclear energy. As Brand explains:

“There were legitimate reasons to worry about nuclear power, but now that we know about the threat of climate change, we have to put the risks in perspective,” he says. “Sure, nuclear waste is a problem, but the great thing about it is you know where it is and you can guard it. The bad thing about coal waste is that you don’t know where it is and you don’t know what it’s doing. The carbon dioxide is in everybody’s atmosphere.”

Ultimately, Brand’s view is the one that will win out. If we’re serious about climate change, things like Kyoto are meaningless efforts designed to reward bureaucracies over encouraging the sort of innovation that will truly fix the problem. Technologies like nuclear energy, genetic engineering, and nanotechnology have the potential to erase decades worth of environmental damage — provided that the primitivist impulses of many in the environmentalist movement don’t continue to blind the majority to the promise of new technologies.

The solution to climate change may be under construction in someone’s garage right now. Human history teaches us that demanding that people make drastic cutbacks in their lifestyle is a loser — human innovation is what keeps human society advancing in the face of adversity. We need an environmentalist movement that is all about fostering innovating, encouraging new technologies, and not becoming a secular religion that demands that the eco-sinners repent with carbon credits while the high priests of the environmentalist movement wear lecture us from their mega-mansions and private jets.

Brand’s form of environmentalism may be the minority now, but Brand has the right idea — and the future belongs to innovators, not eco-Puritans. The path to a better life requires us to embrace the sometimes-frightening world of technological change. Trying to set back the clock won’t work, but embracing the innovations of the future can ensure that we live more ecologically-sound lives without sacrificing our quality of life.

ABC has a piece that shows the level of scholarly skepticism over the claims that the tomb found in 1980 was actually the tomb of Jesus Christ and his family. On a more religious note, The Anchoress also finds the story less than plausible.

One needn’t reach to religious reasons to doubt this story. The names on the ossuaries were all very common names in 1st Century Palestine. For instance, one out of every four women in that time were named “Maryam” (the Semitic version of “Mary”), so to find a tomb with that name is not surprising. Likewise, “Yeshua” was a common name at the time — even “Yeshua bar Yosef” (Jesus, son of Joseph) wouldn’t have been a particularly noteworthy name.

The problem with this being the gravesite of Jesus of Nazareth is that one would think that a man who had already attracted a number of followers would at least have been buried in an ossuary with more than a crudely scratched inscription — or any inscription at all.

Historically, none of this seems to make much sense, even if one doesn’t take the Biblical accounts at face value. While statisticians will say that the chances of all these names being in the same spot is rare, it is not impossible. The people selling this story seem to be making considerable referential leaps — for instance, there’s no evidence that Joseph was buried in the tomb. It would be odd that the patriarch wouldn’t be buried in the family crypt. Furthermore, the family tree that is presented isn’t supported by any evidence from the tomb itself. All we know is that the Jesus/Joshua buried there isn’t related to the Mariamne buried there. We have no idea if the Maria in the crypt is the mother of Jesus/Joshua, or any of the other relationships between the individuals there.

This is certainly an authentic First Century A.D. burial, of that there can be little doubt. However, no matter what the statistics say, the chances of this being the burial site of Jesus Christ seems to be an inferential leap that is wholly unwarranted by the evidence. However, I’ll certainly watch the special and see if they have anything else that can justify such a powerful claim.